Give up your free will now. In the future, Google and other search engines will search you and dictate to you, not the other way around. Maybe.As you'll read in InformationWeek's forthcoming feature on the future of search, the future of search is certainly, at the least, one of very powerful search engines that could bring people all sorts of new knowledge.

But in the search dystopia, Google and Yahoo will tell you what you need to do, how to do it, and when. Sure, this is me spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt and is admittedly unlikely or at least a twisting of what search companies are aiming for. But as heavy-handed hyperbole goes, it's actually not altogether untenable as a potentially dystopic vision of the future of search.

I see three major pieces to this puzzle, so stay with me here. Search technologies under development today are "learning" language as programmers and linguists code them to pull semantic meaning from queries and Web pages. When companies like Hakia, Powerset, and Google get the kinks out, this will give search engines the power to speak and be spoken to, to converse with searchers and figure out their search intents.

Meanwhile, major search companies like Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in personalization, both in search results and in advertisements. Google allows users to store and personalize their search history and experience, even recommending sites based on past searches. Think about how much personal information companies like Google and Microsoft increasingly control or have access to, including your calendar, e-mail, productivity applications, and file system, especially as more and more information and applications end up on the Internet.

The third piece of this puzzle is contextual, query-less search. Already, products like MediaRiver's Watson can peer into your Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Web browser, and a number of other pieces of software to see what you're up to right now and give you site recommendations. Microsoft recently applied for a patent that would identify someone watching a display or working at a computer via biometrics or a camera and then serve personally relevant ads based on a number of personal identifiers like marital status, age, and even personal calendars. Creeped out yet?

Combine the three, and you get a picture of a search engine that actually tells you -- sorry, Microsoft -- where you want to go today. If this holds up, and if the search records AOL released to researchers last year are any indication, the search engine of the future will know and anticipate all your work, earthly, and carnal desires, whether you want it to or not. At that point, we reach a debate: do you control the machine, or does it control you?

I must say, this isn't the future of search I personally envision, only a variation. Search engines of the future will have these powers, but will only leverage them to the degree we let them and only to the level of credence we give to the idea of search engine as final arbiter of the truth. The key to evading such a future is to give users control over what search engines can see, keep, and use -- but it remains one unlikely possibility in a sea of others, and one that would have gelled nicely with the future worlds of writers like Huxley and Orwell.