Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a sense of humor about himself.

That's what I suspected after his Jan. 6 keynote at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), when Ballmer stood before the audience in a bright red sweater and announced: "We Bing, and we Bing, Bing, Bing all the time--at least in my world." I felt sure he was poking a little fun at his much-publicized proclivity for occasionally repeating the same word in sequence.

Microsoft's Bing team, though, seems to want its users to Bing a little less--or at least a bit more efficiently. That's what I've picked up on during conversations here at CES over the past few days: that Bing in 2010 will take steps to:

1.) Refine its data ingestion process

2.) Attempt to sense better what its users want out of a particular search

3.) Structure results more efficiently

Microsoft's upcoming search-and-advertising agreement with Yahoo could help with that first item, given that Bing powering search on Yahoo's pages will mean that Yahoo users' data will flow back into (and help refine) Bing's processes. But apparently there's only so much of that sort of data that a search engine can take in before the law of diminishing returns begins to apply itself; to further help its data ingestion process, Microsoft will also rely on structured data, such as movie listings, developed by third parties.

The second item, attempting to better sense what users want out of a particular search ("weather," say, or "nearby restaurants"), will necessitate Bing stitching together data from multiple sources, including seeing what other users who searched for those same terms eventually settled upon.

But the third one interested me in particular. If you type in, say, a restaurant name into Bing, it will offer you a dynamic scorecard of items such as "portion size," "presentation," "service," and the like. But it's not people assembling those scores, at least not in a direct way: a Bing algorithm semantically analyzes various reviews, scores words, and produces a result.

In 2010, the Bing team will apparently focus on refining that process, working the equations to produce better results for those Bing "task pages" that pull data from multiple sources. "It's about optimizing the end user," a Microsoft spokesperson told me yesterday afternoon.

Bing and Google have been engaged recently in a bit of competitive tit-for-tat, with each search engine adding additional features, or expanding the functionality of existing ones, in a bid to either attract more users (in Bing's case) or maintain their already substantial user base (Google). That competition has been active pretty much ever since Bing launched last summer, and shows no signs of going away soon.

But as both Bing and Google add functionality, and as Bing further attempts to refine its search processes, I can't help but think that, with each passing month, we get further away from the traditional search-engine model of "page of blue hyperlinks." And while we may never escape that particular model entirely, it's fun to conjecture about how different search will look five years from now, or 10.

What do you think?