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There is no “search”

Often I get frustrated when people say “search” as if what google does and what they do for […]

Often I get frustrated when people say “search” as if what google does and what they do for their small eccomerce site should be the same thing. Other players are realizing that there are many search chores, and more than one way to skin a cat: FT.com / Home UK – How to free the slaves from the webmasters

“Mr Horowitz, however, has no doubt that social search is the future: “You don’t need social search to find the population of London – you do to find a plumber,” he claims. Now that could be a search too far, even for Yahoo.”

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  1. 1
    Jared Spool

    I agree completely.

    In our writing, we distinguish on-site search from web-wide search. However, there’s even more distinctions that we probably oughta make, such as the difference between searching for a book by title and searching for the right job to meet your needs and experience.

    I’d love to see a taxonomy of different types of Search.

  2. 2
    Austin Govella

    Search design carries years worth of old, unquestioned baggage. Where we’ve refined browse interfaces, we haven’t refined interfaces for search.

    We still use the same command line and directory list we developed decades ago.

    People need to design search the way they design everything else; think about the assumptions and the context; and discard te old search demons in favor of better, more intuitive, and easier to use (more effective) demons.

    Beyond that, I think Mr. Horowitz is a little distracted. All search is social. If we really mean “people search”, then we should specify.

  3. 3
    Keith Instone

    I like Mike Moran’s article about the differences between web search and site search – http://www.mikemoran.com/biznology/Nov2005.htm (disclaimer – I work with Mike @ IBM).

    Also, the first “nomenclature” we need to iron out is when some people use “search” to mean typing a word into a box and pressing enter, vs. others who use “search” to mean anything you do to find stuff.

    And then there are a few that define “search” as what the technology called “search engines” support.

    I would prefere a usage focused classifcation of search behavior to help sort out the mess.

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