In a world of Google and Bing (...we try to stay balanced) searching for what you want is becoming the norm.  Fewer and fewer people know the sites they want to visit (with exceptions of course) and even fewer seem to care about learning a sites navigation.

So step-up search.  Having a smart and intuitive search can really help your users and potential customers find what they want, or what you want to show them.

The travel industry seems to rely on search a lot more than others too.  There can be millions of combinations of holidays with different travel dates, lengths of trips, transfers, car hire, hotels, types of room etc.

Having a smarter search that maybe asks for a few more details than just a single box is probably best.  By asking for a destination, check-in and check-out date we can be a lot more precise in the results we show from the first click.  It can also make searches a lot quicker as it narrows the options significantly.

A great feature offered by Expedia is an automatic search save.  I think it's great.  How many times have you searched for something and then completely forgotten the site and how you get there.  It is easier for Expedia as customers seem to remember them as they're already very well known across the world, however saving a search parameter like this is easy and helps people find deals they may have found yesterday.

The way we display search results is also crucial.  We don't want to inundate the user with so many options with so much information that they get an instant headache and never come back to the site.

Obviously all sites have different types of visitors, and this means there is no one right answer about this.  In general however we need to think about what the average visitor wants from their search.  Do they want price straight away, do they want to know about pools and tennis courts, excursions or flight times?

It's difficult, but what a user searches could help support this.  As a travel site we'd hope to have a lot of historical data about what certain searches end up selling.  With this big data we could push excursions to people searching for China, and all-inclusive features to people searching for Cape Verde.

It's not a perfect science, but the more data we have the more intelligent the results can be.