This month Jakob Nielsen turns to search engines: 'mental models for search are getting firmer' he says. What does he mean? People now have a fair idea of how they want search engines to work. Basically it boils down to a text box, a search button and results. No fancy boolean searches, no metadata searches. To put it bluntly, they just expect search to work. Search engines like Google have enabled people to search simply and now that is what they expect of all search engines.
So, how does our search engine shape up? From the word-of-mouth reports I have received over a number of years, not very well. So how do we improve it? By taking this mental model of search that most people have and trying to make it work with our search engine. This would mean a simple, one text box search that allows for some specialised searching but that doesn't require specialised searching to achieve decent results. This may mean a bit of thought in terms of configuration but as long as the audience doesn't require thought to search, we should see some improvement. The search engine needs to do the 'thinking'.
Search engines like Google have led to a level of expectation and like it or not, if your search engine doesn't match up, it's going to perceived as being hard to use.
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