The query formulation has always been a challenge for the users. In this paper, we propose a novel interactive query expansion methodology that identifies and presents the potential directions (generalised concepts) for the given query enabling the user to explore the interested topic further. The methodology proposed is concept-based direction (CoD) finder which relies on the external knowledge repository for finding the directions. Wikipedia, the most important non-profit crowdsourcing project, is considered as the external knowledge repository for CoD finder methodology. CoD finder identifies the concepts for the given query and derives the generalised direction for each of the concepts, based on the content of the Wikipedia article and the categories it belongs to. The CoD finder methodology has been evaluated in the crowdsourcing marketplace - Amazon's Mechanical Turk for measuring the quality of the identified potential directions. The evaluation result shows that the potential directions identified by the CoD finder methodology produces better precision and recall for the given queries. Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.