What will make a better Search Engine?

Sometimes, as a search engine marketer, it's easy for me to concentrate on driving traffic to my client's sites and not think to much about what actually makes people use a search engine. In my graduate school days, I spent hours of research time trying to determine "why" people used the internet the way they did. We've come a long way from those days of the Internet, but the question still remains - what motivates individuals to use the internet - convenience? curiousity? coolness factor? a combination of all? As Blumler and Katz state in their "Uses and Gratifications of Mass Communication" theory, it's probably different for each consumer. After all, media consumers have a free will to determine how and why they use the media.

But in the blog post below, Greg Sterling of The Kelsey Group lets us know that Accoona, the search engine that launched last fall with Bill Clinton cutting the ribbon and the promise of billions of Chinese consumers, is in trouble. And he says no one will gain market share in the search engine world unless they are better that Google, MSN, Ask, Yahoo and the others. I agree with this assessment. What I don't know, however, is WHAT will make the next search engine better. Will it be personalization, relevancy or something I can't even imagine? I'd love to hear others thoughts.


- Search Engine Journal