March 16, 2006

Progressive Searches

After I coined the phrase "Isolated Frog Syndrome", probably this is the next nomenclature introduced by me, though the former is more concerned with the Interpersonal relationships in an organization and the correponding observations at some mangerial levels, the latter is more concerened with the technical aspects of searches.

In Google SearchBox, when you type in a search phrase, a count of the availble results that might be fetched is displayed in the drop down list. Numerous search enthusiasts have concluded that the number of duplicates is large in the count that is specified.

When one visits Clusty and does a search , the searches are categorized into various heading(termed 'Categories' or 'Dimensions'), and a count is specified next to the Categories; when the user clicks on a Category only that many number of hits are displayed. I find this to be a serious flaw, in the sense that we are not making use of the available search facility , and this prompted me to coin Progressive searches.

Probably, when the user clicks on the Dimensions/Categories, a subsequent search should be initiated which can fetch more results than the count that is originally specified.One may argue that this can confuse the user, as he/she is going to see more results than the count that is originally specified in the previous page, but technically speaking, if the user knows that the Search Engine supports a functionality of Progressive Searches , then he doesnt have to worry about the counts not matching. The Subsequent search while peroforming a progressive search will not fetch results less than the count that is specified.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Check out Clusty today, which introduced a novel combination of clustering with new-search via the new "Search for more results like these" feature.