While users dependence on search continues to increase, user satisfaction is not improving. This is partly because search is hard, and partly because users are becoming more demanding and pushing search beyond the traditional scope of information retrieval. Our research reveals three key problems of search: imprecise results, need for query refinement, and need to support complex tasks and decisions. Semantic technologies can help address these problems by providing improvements to core search results and also through enabling richer user experiences such as faceted navigation, entity-centered experiences, and task completion and decision tools.