improving usability and discoverability of search engines
Myk Melez
Earlier, in that thread, Joe Hughes said:
> It'd also be interesting to explore post-search rather than pre-search
> engine switching.
His UI idea was:
> a bar at the top of the page
> (like the popups/extension bar) that says something like "See
> 'Yuengling' results from [Yahoo] [Amazon] [Answers.com] [Creative
> Commons] [Wikipedia]"
I'm not sure that's the optimum UI (although I don't have a better
idea), but some measure of post-search switching is worth considering.
Conceptually, it's more like "switching between search results" than
"switching between search engines."
Perhaps its most obvious use case is for searches when users are
dissatisfied with the results from the default engine and want to see
what the other engines return.
But another important use case is any search for which the user wants to
use a non-default engine. Although we currently support that case with
the search engine drop-down, a drop-down menu item is more complicated
to use and harder to discover than a visible widget you just click on to
get results, and I suspect that a significant number of users would
rather switch engines after the fact with a simple click than beforehand
by opening a drop-down menu and selecting a drop-down item.
We'd get even more users with keyboard navigation of the different
engines, specifically those keyboard-focused users (like me) who would
rather type "<ctrl-l> amazon.com <return>" than select the "amazon"
search engine from the drop-down menu by mouse.
And users would also benefit from being able to switch engines for a
specific search without having to switch back for the next one.
Of course, perhaps we should just make pre-search engine selection be
just as one-click easy and discoverable. Earlier, in the Search Box
Usability Notes thread, Jason Spiro said:
> Why not just show multiple search buttons all the time, like the Google
> Toolbar 4 beta does? If you want to search IMDB, you type in your search
> and click the IMDB icon. To search Amazon, you click the Amazon button
> instead. Three or four search buttons wouldn't take up so much space on
> the URL bar. Plus, it would be much less cluttered than the temporary
> search bar you suggest.
That seems reasonable to me, too, and would work both pre- and post- search.
Thoughts?
-myk
Joe Hughes
> Picking up the topic of the Search Box Usability Notes thread...
>
> Earlier, in that thread, Joe Hughes said:
>
>> It'd also be interesting to explore post-search rather than pre-search
>> engine switching.
>
>
> But another important use case is any search for which the user wants to
> use a non-default engine. Although we currently support that case with
> the search engine drop-down, a drop-down menu item is more complicated
> to use and harder to discover than a visible widget you just click on to
> get results, and I suspect that a significant number of users would
> rather switch engines after the fact with a simple click than beforehand
> by opening a drop-down menu and selecting a drop-down item.
Exactly. It's worth noting that IE7 actually includes a form of
post-search engine switching: if you pick a different engine from the
search bar drop-down after a search, it re-does the search with the new
engine. It's a bit more fiddly and less discoverable than my button bar
concept, in exchange for taking up less real estate.
.joe.