[Sigia-l] Searching for Search Results Patterns

[Lyle_Kantrovich at cargill.com]

Has anyone compiled a list of search results patterns and/or examples of 
ways to present results?  I'm thinking of things like "best bets" or 
categorized results, spelling recommendations, "Did you mean" options, 
ways to navigate across a result set, etc.  I've done a lot of searching 
around the way, but to little avail.

In looking for this kind of info, it's interesting that searching for 
things related to "search" is difficult - often because the search box 
label text is also indexed by the search engine used. For example:

Searching for "search" on IAWiki:
http://www.iawiki.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?search=search&dosearch=1

Searching for "search" in the SIGIA-L archives:
http://www.info-arch.org/lists/search.php?query=search&metaname=swishdefault&sort=sent


Other things I've tried:

Searching Google for "search results patterns":
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=search+results+patterns
(I also tried '"search results" design' and a number of other queries 
with little success.)

Avi's Search Tools site has some good info, but not really a list of 
patterns or a collection of examples:
http://www.searchtools.com/


Is this a gap in existing online content?  Does the IA community NOT 
have a place where we at least document different types of searches and 
ways to display results if not "best practices" or patterns?

Any pointers would be appreciated.  My gut tells me someone's done this 
work before...  It also seems that the presentation of search results is 
evolving as the engines available get more features and get more 
sophisticated.


Regards,

Lyle

----
Lyle Kantrovich
User Experience Architect

Croc O' Lyle - Personal Commentary on usability, information 
architecture and design.
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com/

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." 
	- Leonardo da Vinci