The 18th International World Wide Web Conference wrapped up in Madrid a couple of weeks ago. It's the annual get together of the leading propeller heads and computer scientists. They submit research papers and discuss the future of search, which eventually becomes SEO in the future.
My original whitepaper on Themes, Reputation and Topic written in 2000 was inspired by papers submitted at this annual conference in 1999. In it, I described how Google works and still works to this day.
Now, I don't know if anything as big as Google will come out of this conference. But I do know that many of these computer scientists will be going to work for Google , or perhaps starting their own search engines. So if you want a catch a glimpse of the future you can download and read these research papers.
WWC 2009 Site: http://www2009.org
Download Papers: http://www2009.eprints.org

Original post by Michael Campbell