ERGOSIGN Blog

(Dieser Beitrag ist nur in Englisch verfügbar.)

Drawing upon the lines of an earlier blog post (”Search killed the address bar“), the search paradigm becomes increasingly popular — both online and offline — as the main navigation way to access information. So in which direction are search interfaces going in the next future?

Their future could be way more visual than now, about which searchengineland blogged recently. Two of the examples referred to in the article should be emphasized in particular for potential inspiration:

Searchme.com could be described as mashup of Google and Apple’s coverflow: After entering a search string the results are presented as a stream of screenshots of webpages, which can be skipped through either by a mouse slider or keyboard.

The qualification of search results is done nicely through colored highlights within the particular page and on mouse over a detailed description is displayed. Interestingly they also offer an optional additional text-based display of the results at the bottom of the screen. In regard to quantification the visualization fails, there is no clear indication on how many results are available (e.g. per category) or how high each keyword scored in a result.

This way of search results’ visualization and interaction is definitely worth keeping an eye on especially in the context of Document Management Systems (DMS).

oSkope.com plugs into web services (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Flickr and Youtube) and is especially noteworthy in two aspects:

The way to drill down to the information is realized very smoothly, based on the context of previous filters the desired search query grows progressively (e.g. search for “mario” in “amazon” > “amazon.com” > “Computer & Video Games” > “Wii”).

The search results can be arranged in multiple traditional ways (grid, stack, pile, list) and also in a graph relating the results to two service dependent axes (in Amazon’s case price and sales rank) which imaginably offers great potential for intuitive qualification.

This represents definitely a good inspiration when crafting search interfaces for repositories where the elements are highly graphical and thus quickly distinguishable.