I came across a cool thread on LinkedIn Answers via Powerset’s Blog. In it, the COO of LinkedIn asked the following question:

“If you could build the perfect search engine, what would it do?”

The answers are pretty interesting and the themes that crop up are around context, intent and some interesting questions are raised about the role of social search and commenting on search results.

There are some ideas here worth exploring in the context of local deals search and coupon search on couponlooker. In both these cases, restricting the domain should make it possible to do a better job of inferring intent and delivering relevant results. Definitely a case of easier said than done, but a problem worth attacking nonetheless.

It’s also clear that spending more time on LinkedIn might not be a bad idea.