Beyond Regular Search

Search, Google are indispensable part of our lives. A majority of my online time goes with search on Google(80%) and a few others (Bing, Wikipedia, Twitter etc). Little over a decade, in the past no body paid any attention to search and today search stands at the center of our world. Many have said on inadequacy of today's search and I will not venture here into that aspect.

What I will discuss here is how search as it is done today does not meet my current requirements? and what are the things I am looking for as a searcher, as a content provider.

I am someone who can be termed reasonably net savvy user, who tries his best to keep abreast of the developments in the cyber world. I will here discuss some of my search behaviors.

1. Increasingly, I use search for navigation. If I have to find the url of cricinfo, I probably will do a google search than even bookmarking it.
2. Even the above is changing, thanks to chrome which pre-fetches the URL most of the times.
3. Another thing I notice is my search requirements are increasingly becoming more complex. I did not get a good lead even from Google for some of the search terms.
4. Most of my searches arise out of a complex issue at hand. The search engine fails to understand the intent of the problem. Now, I seriously don't expect today's search engines to excel here.
5. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised at the results thrown out. This means the first result is one is that I want to look at!!
6. Love the new integrated results with images and videos.
7. But hate the maps in the results. At least here in India many times it's a distraction. I would go to Google Maps and search than want the crappy result in my regular search.
8. The above I understand is not Google's fault, but it is their problem to solve.
9. I tend to add wiki to every keyword if it remotely resembles a noun.
10. I would love to have a random search feature, just like in wikipedia. It will save me the trip to wikipedia and back.
11. I love tag clouds, anyone heard of Quintura.(wow I got this spelling correct without googling and image search here for google results in an unexpected result).
12. I would love to continue but, I am too lazy that's it. My 11 search use cases.

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