I've not had occasion to make this decision on the development side but from my own user perspective I really dislike sites that present a minuscule amount of results with no mechanism for increasing that quantity. I think many sites do that in order to increase the number of ad views... the greater the number of ad views, the more potential revenue from click-throughs.
Yahoo and Google allow users to configure their default number of search results (I set mine to the maximum of 100) and that number is saved in a cookie and referenced when the user is signed in to the site. The downside of that approach is that a user must be signed in to the site in order for that configuration decision to be active. Many users object to that from a privacy perspective. Having a session-based cookie can work as well but some sites that implement these controls do so only for each search query... do a new search query and the results page comes up with the default number of responses and the control set back to the minimum number of responses. Of course, if the results incorporate a graphic for each result listed, a greater number of results yields a longer time to completion of the page load, so it's a tradeoff. A popular site may run into bandwidth limitations from its hosting company and possibly high bandwidth surcharges. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47813 ________________________________________________________________ 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
