Daniel Rose and Danny Levinson, both from Yahoo!, decided to take a different approach to thinking about how search engines work, and how people use them. They considered focusing upon a slightly different inquiry.

Why do people use search engines?

In Understanding User Goals in Web Search (PDF), they see if that question provides them any value in how they deliver results to people using their services. Here is how they describe their leaping off point:

Our premise is that web searches reflect a diverse set of underlying user goals, and that knowledge of those goals offers the prospect of future improvements to web search engines. Achieving these improvements is an ambitious project involving three primary tasks. First, we need to create a conceptual framework for user goals. Second, we need a way for search engines to associate user goals with queries. Third, we need to modify the engines in order to exploit the goal information.

The “Search Goal Hierarchy” table they present is one you should look at even if you build web sites instead of search engines. It may help give you some ideas of how you can build sites that people will look for on those search engines.

One of their conclusions is that people often look for online or offline “resources” on the web. While that might not seem like a novel conclusion, have you been building pages that people would consider to be a resource worth bookmarking?