I agree with you that humans are better than machines in determining what we want. Hence the rise in social bookmarking sites. I think search engines will be using human behavioral patterns more in their algorithms. I would imagine it would be limited at first, but I have no doubt those patterns will make it into the algorithms somehow.

I’ll never make absolute predictions like machines never being able to fully grasp human behavior, but I think for many years to come we’ll be doing a better job of understanding those patterns than any machine or algorithm

Humans are far superior in determining what they need when compared to computers determining what humans need (while a computer may be excellent in determining what it needs, I suspect).

I don’t think people will make machines to fully grasp the human behaviour patterns, but they’ll get close soon (Google, for instance). Human behaviour is an old field and it encompasses many already known areas, so this is a matter of putting things into the search engine algorithm, sometimes.

To me, this is just another sign to intergrate the principle of providing value to customers.