Feature Proposal: Integrate WebSearch, WebSearchAdvanced, Alphabetical search and SearchHelp
Motivation
With the advances of Sven's paginated search we have a nice focus on search improvements. We should not neglect the search pages.
Description and Documentation
I think these can be improved with:
- A tabbed navigation across the topics
- Providing a natural progression from default WebSearch to WebSearchAdvanced through a "more search options" link
- WebSearchAdvanced will exist as page because of existing links
- Make it easier to modify the search by keeping the search box at the top, and having the options folded in
- Integrate A-Z search instead of in the "tips" block at the bottom
- Provide help in a tab instead of a small link
In all, this should lead to a cleaner and more efficient user interface.
Examples
See the page mockups how this could work:
Impact
Implementation
For the tabbed navigation we would introduce a 'default' (base.css) style, or let jquery provide the behaviour and base styling.
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Contributors: ArthurClemens - 17 Mar 2010
Discussion
Very cool!
Some remarks:
- "Number of topics: 36" seems to be redundant.
- "Search in all public webs" is too hidden.
- "Sort by" is hidden even more inside two nested twisties
- pagination should be added as well
- the "Don't show" options can be removed for simplicity
- the different types of search are far from intuitive; normal users most probably expect a kind of google query language; there should only be two types of search: a simple and an advanced
- "Limiting results per web" is an artefact of the current default search engine; limiting results per page makes more sense.
- there should be only three sorting types: relevance (default), alphabetical, last changed
- by default user should not be bother to distinguish topic search and content search; this distinction isn't that useful
Here's a screenshot of the current search interface of SolrPlugin which has got some parts that I'd recommend for normal
WebSearch as well.
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MichaelDaum - 17 Mar 2010
Michael, I agree with most of your points. This layout is based on what is possible and offered today. Good to push it even further:
- Remove "Search where" for default search
- Offer sorting options instead for default search: as you say, relevance (default), alphabetical, last changed
Make "Search in all webs" more prominent.
When result sets are finished we should:
- Add pagination
- Remove grouping by web. Should we offer any grouping in default search?
Different types of search are for advanced users. But I would not remove them entirely.
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ArthurClemens - 17 Mar 2010
This proposal is passed by 14-day rule.
But as I do not see any checkins yet for this, and I also see a great deal of work, I assume this is a 2.0 scope work.
We are past the official feature freeze date now, and any new features not yet started and reasonably implemented will have to be deferred.
Because of Easter holidays I assume many of you would like to spend the days off on some programming I I give you till Monday the 5th if you have the work ready to checkin.
But if you expect this to take many weeks, please defer to 2.0. It is not a killer feature we cannot live without.
Based on the discussion I really think the implementation should be done on 2.0 so we have time to discuss and improve once we see it in reality.
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KennethLavrsen - 01 Apr 2010
Implementation is done (
Tasks.Item8839 ), but I need to do proper browser testing when I am at home.
What I haven't done:
- Display the number of hits with each row "xxx results in YYY web"
- Use a toggle for advanced search - this is now a tab
- List all topics on page one of A-Z. Perhaps this is not necessary.
- Rewriting of SearchHelp. This is a separate task.
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ArthurClemens - 04 Apr 2010