We have customers, internally and externally, that have expectations around "generic" search terms and what results they should see.  For example, when a customer searches for "conduit", or "wire" the expectation is that the results returned would be conduit by type and size or wire by type and size - with the most popular types first.

I've used search boosting to get at least the most popular items first - but it still falls way short of expectations.  

What kinds of things are others doing for these more generic terms?