Search Destination Design - Page 27
June 8, 2001
When the user follows a link from a search results listing, the
destination page should be presented in context of the user's
search. Doing so requires use of a document management system
that can construct dynamic pages that change presentation
depending on the user's specific search. In principle,
destination pages should adapt to the user's search in all cases,
but in practice, it is normally only feasible to do so for
searches from the site's own search engine. Users who arrive from
Internet-wide search engines like Infoseek will probably get
static pages because of lack of integration between the site and
the search engine.
The most common way to enhance a search destination page is to
highlight all occurrences of the user's search terms. By doing
so, users can more rapidly scan the page to pick out those parts
of the page that describe the topic of interest. Helping users
find their search terms on your page also makes it faster for
them to assess why the search engine included the page in the
results listing and whether the use of the search terms on the
page is relevant to their needs.
Integrating Sites and Search Engines
It would be pretty easy to integrate sites more closely with
search engines. If search engines would agree on a standardized
method for encoding the user's query terms, then many sites would
probably make the effort to serve programmatically defined pages
that highlighted occurrences of the query term.
It should also be possible for search engines to present search
results in a more structured manner if they download sitemap
definition files and use them to derive the structure of each
site's information space. If, for example, a given site has five
pages with hits for a given query, and four of these hits are in
one closely related set of pages, then the search results list
should probably list two hits for the site. The group of four
pages should be represented by a single reference to the center,
or most important, of the pages (with an icon indicating that the
hit represents a cluster of pages).
In my opinion, Infoseek has the easiest interface for expanding
the user's search with related terms. The search engine selects a
small number of related terms, meaning that the user will often
take the time to read them and consider whether they would be
useful search alternatives. Also, repeating the search with a new
term is a simple matter of clicking the desired term.
Unfortunately, the desire to highlight the advertisement has led
to a large distance and a visually intrusive interruption between
the user's search term (here "web usability") and the suggested
related topics. Many users are probably going to overlook the
related topics because they tend to disappear in the clutter in
the upper and left parts of the page.
AltaVista seems to overwhelm the user with too many options and
alternative terms. Some expert users may appreciate this
extensive listing of alternative search terms, but most users are
likely to be scared away from the otherwise very useful ability
to rephrase their queries. I would have preferred a design with a
smaller number of options that were linked to this huge table as
an "expert search."
Excite also provides a way to add synonyms. In this example, it
would be useful to search for "css" if the user was interested in
"cascading style sheets." More important, each search hit has a
"more like this" link that performs relevance feedback and
searches for pages that are similar to the one the user liked. In
principle, it would be better to have a "find more like this"
button on the actual destination pages, but doing so would
require integration between the site and the search engine. In
this figure, a reasonably subtle background color is used to
enclose the available search options and set them apart, leading
to a less busy appearance than Infoseek or AltaVista. Putting the
hint about the meaning of the "more like this" buttons into the
middle of the search results listing is a rather unconventional
design, but it does seem to work: The user's eye is caught by the
change in background color and layout, and the matching colors
lead to a unification of the hint with the main search area at
the top of the page.
Search Examples - Page 26
Designing Web Usability
Search Destination Design: Further Examples - Page 28
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