Useful features I think Google should implement: web search using regular expressions and the use of word proximity. Regexes are, well, self-explanatory for those who would bother to use them. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’re already trying to solve this problem right now.
Word proximity is something that DejaNews used to implement when they were still around. It helped reduce search result noise immensely when searching in newsgroups. I remember being bummed when that feature wasn’t available after Google took over Deja’s database as Google Groups (I still like to affectionately call it Gooja).
With word proximity, you could specify search terms with a proximity constraint so that results were only returned for terms that occured within a certain number of words from each other. That made for much better search results, especially during a technically oriented searches. There’s nothing more annoying than getting an entire page of results where the words you were looking for end up occuring at the beginning and end of a document.
