Search Interfaces

[ByronM]

Do you like/use DHTML/Ajax/Rich interfaces to search? Would you ever use type-ahead features, or search consolidation such as a9?

Do you think search engines lack in representing data? If you could have a search interface would you like to be able to "post process" the results by sorting them even deeper such as not just by score but by last update date and other fields (meta information)?

Or do you just like it simple or purely raw (xml/rss)?

[inbound]

I suspect that most people like a simple interface ala Google (hence why Google grew so quickly) and at least semi relevant results.

You have to remember that most people out there don't care about how search works. Even more so, they want search to work well without them having to learn how to search well.

[ByronM]

There is a market for everything. I think google looks like crap when compared to yahoo as far as ease of reading and visual display.

Good results mean everything, but i'm wondering if people are looking for something better or something particular.

I ask because google uses dmoz.org descriptions yet msn switched over and now everyone says MSN sucks.. hows is all that determined? :)

[mooret]

Thus I like googles simplicity " just having a search box) thus its now slowly being turned into a portal I also like the news site bar offered on yahoo homepages. I simply load up yahoo and I get a breakdown of the top news headlines.

But when it comes to search I prefer The simple search box.

One thing thus in the past when you searched on yahoo it brought up sites but under each site it brought up link to the directory it was listed in . This was pretty usefull as you could click on the directory link and it brings up similar sites/sites in the same directory.