Web search engines have a huge interest in understanding what our users are trying to do. To a certain degree, this means discerning the intent of a search in the queries and patterns of behavior. In this talk I'll say a little bit about what we do to understand what our users have in mind, giving examples of queries, user sessions. To make this tangible, I'll discuss some of the techniques we use to analyze the data and outline the size and scope of the problem. In particular, I'll focus on the problem of combining data in the small (field studies, usability studies) with data in the large (log data analysis of millions of interactions), illustrating how we can improve our understanding of users by combining the best insights from both ends of the spectrum.