I think one hard part is to have an innovative UI you have to focus on a specific user task. The are a variety of tasks that quickly lead to developing application/domain specific interfaces (e.g. planning a trip or finding a hotel, etc…). From those it’s hard to extract a common pattern.

I look forward to hearing more details on the Semantic search panel.

I wrote about it a bit only a couple of months ago, but have had the suspicion for years that their own paradigms outweighed anything that the users did or tried to do or asked for. I.e. a lot of the rules and restrictions around non-minute interface redesign came from top-down decisions and fear of messing up the “magic”, rather than bottom up innovation.

I don’t know who they are, but there have got to be voices internally at Google who have long wanted to do something like this, add richness and value to the search experience. I know there are people there who have to have thought about it, no matter what the official “clean (aka sparse) interface trumps all else” line has been. The time may be right for their coup Thanks for getting that fire lit, and I look forward to adding Bing to my search engine rotation.

Bing it on!
-Mark Johnson, Bing Program Manager