The starting point for innovating in the search engine begins with understanding the 'intent' with which a user approaches a search portal. There are a considerable number of users who use a search engine for 'domain navigation; in other words, to get to a site they have in mind. But a bigger chunk of users are in onewayor the other 'looking for answers' to a particular query.And there isa limit to which technology can go in understanding the 'intent' of the user.

He is obviously not expected to be taught how to search, and thus the search engine should be'intelligent' enough to understand what the user might be looking for. Top search engines are now trying to have the ability to know a searcher's intent by knowing the mode he is in.As a searcher can be looking to buy, to research or just be entertained, each of these different modes can lead to a totally different result for the same search. Microsoft with their Live Search and Google are focusing on knowing what mode users are in when they are using search, so that they can be' provided with the b'est results possible.



Apart from the mode that users are in, the search service providers are trying to incorporate algorithms and Al techniques that help them determine the intent of the query more accurately, despite common problems such as spelling errors, punctuations and com mon words ( like 'is', 'are' that are mostly neglected from the search phrase). Thus not just emphasizing on the keywords, but also trying to evaluate the meaning of the search query. Hakia is one such search engine that uses QDEX (Query Detection and Extraction) indexing model, which does a deep semantic analysis of the pages it crawls. It not only matches the keywords from the search query, but also formulates the meaning of the query to match with the pages' content to produce a relevant result. Knowing the intent of the searcher is what can lead to provide more personalized search results to the user; Yahoo Mindset search is based on being intent driven.