I feel like the UI and UX for search engines has been pretty stagnant and I'd like to hear your crazy ideas for features that would be included in the search engine of the future.
I'll restrict the question a bit further. I know when picturing your ideal engine of the future, some of you will think of one that'd be privacy preserving, with no ads or with clearly-marked ads that don't detract from the experience, good natural language understanding, and a minimal UI like a single text field. That's certainly good but we already had that 20 years ago, so I think it'd be interesting not to rehash these particular aspects.
As an example here as some past features that I feel were interesting:
- bang commands
- boolean operators
- image similarity search
- "I'm feeling lucky" button
An example of a feature that I think would be interesting in the future would be to show the user an interactive scatter-plot of queries similar to theirs. They could identify the different clusters for a single query (for example when querying 'pandas' they could see clusters for zoologists, users of the Python library, and cute animal video enthusiasts) and select the search-bubble they want to belong to.
So what other features would you like to see in the search engine of the future?
Other things could be date, length, number of ads. A consumer focused search engine could even let you filter out pages that use javascript, maybe specific libraries, cookies, etc.
It would be like one of those Tableau demos, but looking for websites.
Your example with pandas is cool, but I never found something like that necessary because I could add another word, e.g. "pandas python" or "panda zoo".