A relevant quote from Avinash Kaushik (Google's analytics wizard):
"In the good old days, people dutifully used site navigation at the
left, right, or top of a website. But, two websites have fundamentally
altered how we navigate the web: Amazon, because the site is so big,
sells so many things, and is so complicated that many of us go
directly to the site search box on arrival. And Google, which has
trained us to show up, type what we want, and hit the search button.
Now when people show up at a website, many of them ignore our lovingly
crafted navigational elements and jump to the site search box. The
increased use of site search as a core navigation method makes it very
important to understand the data that site search generates."
You can read the rest here (it's an excellent read):
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/internal-site-search-analysis-simple-effective-life-altering/
Also, one more aspect of search dominance is the screen size you're
working with...mobile makes showing large navigation structures
difficult at best.
Just one example: Amazon's iPhone app is completely search dominant.
(there is no IA to speak of)
Josh
On Sep 24, 2009, at 12:44 PM, Peter Morville wrote:
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
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