A debate with Jared about the stinkyness of site search? I'm having a flashback ;-)
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000004.php ...now, I'm not about to argue against the value of information architecture...that would feel a little strange...I just don't understand why folks insist on pitting search and browse against one another. We need both and they need to work together. Sites that employ faceted navigation serve as a good example. In my experience over the past few years, I've seen plenty of investment in information architecture (browse/navigation in particular) and not enough in getting search right. Okay, I'm going back into lurker mode now...I have to finish my book about search :-) Peter Morville President, Semantic Studios http://semanticstudios.com/ http://findability.org/ -----Original Message----- From: Jared Spool [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 12:08 PM To: Peter Morville Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Toward a search dominant wayfinding paradigm (worthit?) On Sep 24, 2009, at 9:18 AM, Peter Morville wrote: > I agree that large corporate (and .edu and .gov) websites should at > least seriously consider migrating to a search-centered strategy. I predict this will fail. > Browsing rarely scales well. Nothing scales well, but I believe a well tuned IA is going to outplay a search engine any day. Facets scale best, for many types of data. > Site search is increasingly a choice of first resort. There is no evidence to support this. It's a matter of the nature of the content. If people know unique identifiers (exact titles, authors, part numbers), then search will always trump any category hierarchy or facets. That's why media products (such as books and music) do well with search. However, search on data where the people don't have unique identifiers (such as much of the content one might find on the Adobe.com site) doesn't do well. Users enter generic keywords into search and the results presentation is rarely helpful. I'm going to bet that if David looks closely at Adobe.com's stats, most of the users don't try search from the home page. If they try search, it will be from somewhere deep in the site. This tells me that they are using search to recover from a failure in IA. They couldn't find what they were looking for by following trigger words, so they resorted to Search (where, what they enter into the Search box is their trigger words). That's my take. Jared ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
