Re: best practices for search within results

On Dec 18, 2012, at 10:16 AM, Susan Farrell wrote:
>=20
> Note that Google accomplishes this search-within trick by simply =
adding term 2 to term 1 in the search box. If that would work for your =
search engine, you could teach users to do this by showing them the =
query string in the first box as it is altered to use the second term. =
They could widen their search by deleting any operator and the second =
(or third, etc.) term.

I agree, users have learned (from Hotbot to through Google) to just keep =
adding terms, so it's really important to not break this.  Let them =
type!

If you have any kind of structured data, showing facets is the most =
powerful way to help your users to make informed choices.  E-commerce =
has adopted this, rather than the form interfaces they used to have, =
because it just works. =20

Now that I think of it, you could create facets dynamically, using the =
technical terms in your accumulator, perhaps with some kind of indicator =
about overlap or taxonomy hierarchy. =20

For any kind of faceting though, you should use search engine software =
designed with the functionality rather than writing yourself or trying =
to force a database to do this work.  There are a lot of hidden =
complexities in search that bite inhouse developers, from how to index =
dashes to spellchecking to handling to search analytics.  Free open =
source search engines such as Lucene/Solr, Xapian, Elastic Search, and =
Sphinx let you concentrate on the functionality of your system rather =
than re-inventing the wheel.

Hope that helps

Avi Rappoport
Search Analyst
Search Tools Consulting=20=

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