A collection of search engine frustrations led me to creating htis site. I love the internet, and the wealth of information available, but finding the info people want, even using these multi billion dollar search engines, is difficult sometimes.
I am sure it is different for different people, and the needs of a professional webmaster will be differnt than the housewife looking for recipes, but there are some things that could be done better that will make search much better, and I would like to share some of my ideas. Below is a quick example of something similar to my thoughts, a few search operation available with a custom pageflakes set up.. but the search boxes are not auto-populated when I type a search in one box.. and there are not many of the available operations for narrowing the search, or expanding in various ways, that advanced search users can do, and the average users has not idea of the possibilities that are currently available. Both the advanced and basic search users would benefit from easier additions to the search operators.. click not adding pluses, and minuses, having to think of type words.. lets the engines suggest or let you type to add.. this kind of happens when I had used the google toobar in the post.. but it needs to be expanded on.
The initial concept was to showcase some of my ideas, but I know that I am not the only one who has good ideas, so I hope that others will not only share thier comments, but author a few posts as well, and we can show iff some of the unique search engine ideas that are out there.
So, the thoughts I was having about search… The main thing I think we need is multiple columns, collapsable perhaps, but several columns.. the standard search for a term and get results numbered 1 - 1 million seems pretty old fashioned to me. Let’s take the search for “Opera”.
If you type “Opera” into most search engines, you get s amix of results that cover things including the opera web growser (which is very very cool by the way), but what if you are looking for Opera music, or Opera singers.. Well you could see a wikipedia article and find you info that way (as of today wikipedia is on the fist page of search engine results in both Yahoo and google). But what if a search engine was able to display 3 (or more) columns, with results that narrowed. I was thinking about a first column of general search results, and a second column that would narrow the results to say, Opera the browser, and similar sites, then another column that would narrow the results to music, or singers. You get the idea right?
Well at the top or bottom of these results should be an ajax style option checker, such as add a keyword (from a populated list of defineing terms) to narrow the search more, or add a site search with a click… and similar expressions could be added witha click and showing some option, kind of what google does with the “more” link.
You see, if I had my own million dollar search company ,I would make the search page a bit more like netvibes or pageflakes, but not so overwhelming for the average user.. there would of course be more search operations added witha click for advanced users.. doing things like taking the search term and running through various operators and narrow searches, like books, tagged, blogs, etc.. any one of these search result boxes could be expanded with a click, or modified with a “more” operation.
As of today, this is the search engine that I want.. perhaps I will get time to make some graphics to further illustrate my points, but I am not the world’s best graphics guy, but we’ll see.
