Internet search engines are very complicated beasts that work with potentially the largest collection of information humanity has ever developed, and the collection grows every day. This is why some believe Google's page ranking algorithm is the largest numerical calculation done in the world. As the Internet grows though, more and more processing has to be done to categorize all of the information needed to perform a search. Eventually no modern computer or algorithm will be able to analyze the entire Internet, so researchers at the University of Southern California decided to look at the problem with future quantum computers.
By the nature of their design, quantum computers are better able to process large quantities of data than modern computers thanks to their parallel processing capabilities. The researchers put together a model of the Internet with just a few thousand pages and tested what a quantum computer could do. Even with so few webpages, the quantum computer was showing better performance than modern electronic computers. What's more, the performance difference would increase as more webpages have to be processed, and the quantum computer would be faster at reporting whether the ranking data for a webpage needs to be updated or not.
This just leaves the question of which will happen first: the Internet growing beyond Google's ability to analyze it, or the development of commercial quantum computers? My bet would be on quantum computers coming first, but Google and other search engines are going to be working furiously to keep up with the Internet's growth until then.