This may just be my bias after designing both search and taxonomy systems for a few really big companies, but I doubt that searching is actually replacing browsing. Rather, it seems that search technology has improved such that searching is finding its proper niche in the user experience.
While researching critical usability issues for a large corporate search engine, the pareto showed "MAKE IT FIND THINGS!" went off the charts, in comparison to every other issue or feature we could address or add. While building the corporate business unit taxonomy for the same company, we learned very quickly that no one would bother going further than 3 levels deep into the tree, without searching, which encompassed a whopping 10% of the total company hierarchy. We designed and built that, left the rest to searching, and achieved the best of both worlds, IMHO. With a decent search engine, it's nice not to have to cram every single site destination in one global nav system. Conversely, with a simple taxonomy that covers the "hard to finds", you don't need to completely re-engineer your search engine to bring up the founder's biography every time you search for "about us". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=45983 ________________________________________________________________ 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
