The stuff on trending page largely starts out when several people with a lot of steem power vote on something. It continues to rise due the fact many people still vote on them (especially if they are still learning the platform) with the thought that voting on a big post might earn them curation rewards.

In fact the way to curate and win on curating is to stay in the NEW queue instead of trending and try to predict which things will be popular.

As more people gain steem power and it starts to spread out from the developer's and early adopters it will become more varied.

This is why it is important to NOT FLAG posts that don't do anything wrong because someone is making a lot. Those people are the ones most likely to start shifting it away form the way the core group tends to vote. When anyone wins, ultimately in the long run we all do.

It is truly a different environment and it takes some mental mindset changes.

I have a blog entry that is relevant to this at the moment and I've shared the link on a few topics like this. I am not going to put it here so people don't think I'm spamming. If you want to see it click on my name, and it's in my blog starts out as NOT A PONZI. I wrote about these topics.

AS to search.... more of that is coming. A lot of different developers are working on things. Keep your eyes on steemtools.com which is growing like wildfire. That is also why @xerox 's post did so well. The tools he made help with other people making tools a lot, and also made it possible to use steem EVEN when steemit.com itself is down.