Search Engine Land have an interesting post about optimising for re-finding searches, which has got me thinking. They have pointed out a user behaviour which I think is actually fast becoming a primary method for navigating the web:

Here’s an example. One usability test participant likes to view funny videos. She wanted to show me a really funny cat video after she learned that I have a tabby cat. She did not remember the name of the video or the title of the video. But she did remember the search engine she used to discover the video (Yahoo! Video) and the keywords she used to discover the video. So she went to Yahoo! Video and performed a search. I watched her scroll through multiple pages of search results. She wasn’t using keywords to identify the correct search result. She was scanning the video thumbnails, trying to recognize the particular tabby cat in the video.

I know some search engines, like Bing, already display your search history in the left hand nav, but there is much room for improvement here. Many of the searches I perform may be 'failed' searches, because I used poor terms. Maybe a little 'x' could be added so I can remove irrelevant search information. If I enter the same terms several times or on a regular basis, maybe some algorithm could figure out what content I keep going to and start incorporating these results into the navigation, naturally building me a handy start page.

Not I think about it, I'm sure many are already working on ideas like this. Still, it's a revelation to me.