Search: Where to draw the line

While catching up on the blogs that i have missed during my last few screwed up days at work, i came across an interesting one.
Its true that search engines work better for a well-defined generic queries but i feel expecting it to bring relevant results for queries like "six products that are viable alternatives to something" is asking for too much. Generic search engines have their ranking mostly based on string match and less on context. They do try to guess the context based on keywords and do a fair job by showing some sponsored/recommended links.

Applying it to our case, if any website happens to have any combination of words "viable alternatives to something" then the result would definitely have the link to it. Along with that, engine should be programmed to have the domain best associated to that something and should return the website mostly hit/used for that domain. This would help the end-user continue his search and potentially find the result he was looking for. For example a search for "restaurants in bangalore" should return links to services like local search [yahoo, AOL, mobile search], just-dial along with regular results that it shows based on string/keyword match.

Hierarchical networking is not a new concept and is still quite applicable in case where the information gets unmanageable. Line between having the information and knowing who has the information is quite fuzzy and will remain so.