Intent blossoming is a powerful technique where the actions of a small number of savvy users can improve quality for everyone else.

For example, in the Search context, show images in the search results for [foo] if the ratio of queries in the past 90 days for [images of foo] / [foo] is above some threshold.

The small number of savvy users who issue the query [images of foo] are enough to spread that intent for everyone.

One person's effort helps hundreds of other people, implicitly.

Not because they did it to help the other people; they did it to help themselves, in a way that implicitly helps everyone else too.

This is part of the magic of modern search engines.

This can be done because queries aren't code; they don't have side effects.

Previously you couldn't do this kind of intent blossoming for code, because code is dangerous.

But if you could know that a given bit of code couldn't be dangerous when executed, you could apply the same technique.