[Sigia-l] a word or two that means 'go to advanced search'

[tom smith]

Lorelei

My preference is not to have an Advanced Search at all, and to try and 
design the search results to bring back what people want in the first 
place. This may mean a little jiggery-pokery to reorder things by 
popularity, currency, person or date or whatever, but the intention is 
to second-guess most cases. (You may ask yourself why people are 
searching in the first place, but that's another story).

For example, at DeliaOnline, a UK cookery site, (this is not an advert) 
most people generally searched for "chicken" and wanted recipes. So 
that's what we return, chicken recipes, even if they search for "ice 
cream"...only kidding.

Now behind-the-scenes the site has a taxonomy of cooking terms, 
ingredients, measures in unbelievable detail and understandably the 
Delia team wanted (and used to have) an Advanced Search page that 
proudly offered a myriad collection of checkboxes with titles like 
"Spring", "Vegan", "Low fat" and "Dinner". There were many more.

The end result was that people firstly couldn't construct the query 
meaningfully often not knowing exactly what some terms meant, and 
secondly they often created a query that returned no results, like "Low 
fat creamy dinner". It didn't work.

> We've also decided against going with the filter
> results method, since our audience loses interest when
> they have to click too much.

Ah? I would argue that users lose interest when they don't think 
they're going to get to what they want (losing hope), and that the 
"clicking too much" is irrelevant. As Jared calls it "scent".

What we tried to do is reveal the underlying taxonomy by creating a 
little "Also found in" box, with which a user can further filter their 
results. You may want to define interesting "Also Found In", such as 
"recent articles" or "medium sized documents" or "Documents about Fish" 
or "Articles by Bob Down" etc.  I think the "trick" is to provide 
"Also" titles that I can relate to. "More like this..." is a pretty 
loose and hap-hazard concept (which never works anyway).

The "thinking" behind this simple approach was that we tried to second 
guess what most searches would be (look at your log files too). Because 
people expect search engines to "just work", they will try the simple 
one first anyway (using Advanced Search as a desperate last resort). 
And to try to offer opportunities to narrow searches rather than 
present a mind-boggling interface that even those that love it can't 
use.

Given that judging search results for accuracy is subjective anyway, 
maybe I have "dumbed down" the search possibilities, and maybe Delia 
has an audience most would consider as novice users, but the site does 
have many 1000s of items to be searched and regularly receives great 
feedback from the users of the search engine.

cheers

tom

--
tom smith
http://www.othermedia.com/blog/
0207 089 5959
3rd Floor, The Pavilion, Newham's Row, London SE1 3UZ

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