Internet marketers tend to view potential customers as mindless unconscious blobs of mush that waste time aimlessly surfing without rhyme, reason or motivation.  (Yes, I know, this does describe a portion of the marketplace perfectly).  Despite all of our metrics, tracking and lessons learned, this is still more or less the prevalent view of the typical Internet consumer held by Internet marketers.  Customers, by chance, come across your site, and if the colors are big and bold enough and your shopping cart is simple enough – people will buy.

Garbage – most of the time people have very specific goals that they are trying to accomplish. 

Search engines typically don’t make them easy to accomplish.  Sure they’re better than nothing, but a lot of times they just don’t work well.  If I may pull a number out of my ass, I’d say that roughly 10-20% of all searches end unsuccessfully.  I’ve been pontificating for years that search needs to get to a whole new level.  I don’t know what it looks like and it quite literally is the billion dollar idea, but a new fundamental breakthrough in search will unquestionably occur.

Yahoo! Mindset is on the right track.  They use some new technology called “machine learning applied to the problem of text classification” (otherwise known as magic pixy dust) that weights sites as being more commercial or more informational in nature.  The Slider at the top essentially allows the user to add a second dimension to their search.  It has a way to go but I definitely like it and the Internet marketing implications are huge.