Search isn’t great for discovery—for helping to answer unknown unknowns. In other words, you’re not going to find things you didn’t even know you were looking for. 

Sometimes, the best way—the only way—to discover what you’re looking for is to actually go into the physical world. Get out of your chair. Open books and magazines. Ask people—ideally experts or librarians—questions. 

The best executives and business leaders know this; the higher level the business problem (maybe the objective isn’t clear, maybe the path/strategy isn’t), the less they’re querying searches, and the more they’re reading books, taking in-person meetings with other people, and asking the experts for help.

Once they find a magic word and have bought into it (e.g., a new mindset or paradigm), that’s when search traffic for those magic words, possibly a branded keyword that you or your industry has coined, becomes useful once again.

P.S., One such example of a thing I didn’t know I needed—until I saw it!—is this great illustration by Peter Arkle for Popeye’s magazine (via Theispot):