Another great post from Info. Designer Stijn Debrouwere – this one on findability and exploration in search. He says no cares about your home page – they may have gotten to your site through search. (This happened to me – while I’ve visited and written about this blog before, I saw a tweet from @Design_Innovate, which led me to his post at http://tinyurl.com/2duj2c2.) Excerpts below. I want to know what you think about the future of search. – Kathy Sandler
“We need ambient findability. We need smart ways of guiding people towards the content they’d like to see — with categorization and search playing complementary goals….”
“Pete Bell recently opined that search is the enemy of information architecture. That’s too bad, because we’re really going to need great search if we’re to beat Wikipedia at its own game: providing readers with timely information about topics they care about….”
“There’s relevance, and there’s occurrence. When you perform a search, you’re looking for relevant content. A strong indicator of relevance is whether or not the words you’re searching for occur in the result set, but that doesn’t make relevance and occurrence the same thing….”
“a good search engine that blazes through enormous quantities of text is not good enough. Remember, oftentimes you’re not even searching for text, you’re looking for things…”
“Our readers often don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. Perhaps more importantly, people who land on on our site from Google don’t know about all the great similar content they could find if only they’d stick with our site for just a bit longer.”
“part of our strategy should be to make search superfluous in most scenarios where people hope to find more or other information on a certain topic. That means preemptive contextualization, blended search-and-navigation, and assorted methods that humanize the search experience.”