Greg and Jeremy discuss the idea of making search a dialogue – asking the engine to listen to you as you attempt to find what you’re looking for. The software might ask, as many do now for spell checking, “Did you mean…”, then it would refine what it presents to you based on your input. Together you and the software can zero in on the perfect answer for you.
I’ve asked folks about this* in the course of my reporting on search, and always gotten the same response: It’s really hard to do. Such an approach to results works particularly well with limited and/or structured data sets (ie “I see you’re looking for a movie. Did you want a comedy or a drama?”) but not so hot with horizontal, unstructured data.
However, that doesn’t mean folks aren’t working on it (or that some engines, like Teoma or AllTheWeb, don’t have some solutions already, and Yahoo’s “Also Try…” is close as well). The problem is that it’s hard to make the choices presented relevant enough of the time – so that overall, the service is really, really useful, as opposed to often right, but often also wrong.
(*And I also asked how come it was that “Did you mean…” works so well for spell checking. Turns out it’s relatively easy to write an algorithm that takes note of common misspellings and maps them to properly spelled words. The same is not true, however, for concepts.)