In the beginning, there was Google. An almost blank page which did a great job of finding what you want from among lots of possibilities. But  when you’re searching for something for something complicated, where none of the possibilities are exactly right, Google works less well. For example, it’s not very good at finding the lowest airfares to San Francisco on Thanksgiving, or a great movie to watch over the weekend. And when you want to know what airlines your friends prefer, or which movies they’re raving about, it’s no help at all.

That’s because Google looks for what’s on a site, rather than what’s in your head. To get a search of airfares that’s more you-centric, you can go to Kayak.com or an individual airline site. On either, search is faceted and built around where and when you want to go. It’s much narrower, but much more relevant. At Netflix, you can find movie suggestions based on your taste in media,  and what you’ve been watching lately.

Search really gets personal when you get results without even asking. In a sense, that’s what a Facebook newsfeed provides, with updates, likes and comments from your friends. As Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, said in a New Yorker interview published this week, “most of the information that we care about is things that are in our heads, right? And that’s not out there to be indexed, right?”. That’s not always true, but often the best search results are the ones that find you.