Designing Advanced search
People often perceive advanced search interfaces as complicated and overwhelming. Users are usually deterred by the many options and filters, leading to anxiety. Google removed the visible “Advanced Search” link in 2011, reflecting a broad trend towards minimizing complexity in search tools.
What happens when a person types two words in a search box?
Early on, in designing a search system, the developers and I decided to use the AND operator as the default search. Users don’t need to know this, but the search engine would invisibly read a word space as AND (all caps to distinguish it as an operator, not the article “and”). AND means the search words, global warming, would find only documents that must contain both those words. This is considered a simple way to narrow results.
However, these words can occur anywhere within a document.
Finding an exact phrase. While watching users set up queries and look at search results, I noticed that people almost always started with an two words that were meant as an exact phrase, like copper mine, climate change, or water quality. That means these words need to immediately follow one another to reflect the user’s intent.
Put it in quotes. Many people know that using quotes like “global warming” will tag these words as an exact phrase. But not everyone thinks of that. Typing an exact phrase comes automatically before thinking about it. In addition, even if a person knows about the quotes operator, some search systems use single quotes and others use double quotes! How would you know?our
Proximity search
Proximity operators best capture contextual relationships between terms based on the distance between the two terms.
Above: this lawyer already knew to type the search operator (~) for finding heat and conditioning within 100 words. Unfortunately the search site he is used to uses a tilde (~), but we used a carrot (^) to indicate the desired distance between search words in the text, so it didn’t work.
First I made sure we used both keyboard operators for people like him. But I decided to design and test a visual proximity tool as part of the search bar. This is the first mockup:
In testing, I saw two problems with this:
- People didn’t see the tool on the right side. Besides that, it had to be grayed out until the user entered more than one word.
- People struggled to think about what 10, 50, or 100 words meant for the relationship between the two words.
After a few variations, I came upon this simple solution. I used standard or average definitions for same sentence, same paragraph, same page, etc.
- The tool is gray when there is no search.
- When a user types word space, the tool highlights.
- Hovering on the tool brings the options down.
Usage: the most common use was to set up an exact phrase search. Almost everyone started with an exact phrase.