Advanced Search
I was listening to Jared Spool’s podcast, Spoolcast, specifically the episode titled Search, Scent & the Happiness of Pursuit Followup. Jared suggested that the vast majority of people don’t use advanced search, so you should spend effort towards improving the navigation of a site, rather than creating a more powerful search feature. It triggered me to think about my own search habits, and I realized that I wasn’t even sure what options Google included in their advanced search. Now, Jared wasn’t talking about a general web search engine—he was talking about a company’s website—but I found it strange that, as much googling as I do, I don’t use the advanced search.
The reason it really struck me was that just a day or two before, I had been searching for information and received a lot of hits from discussion forums. I was looking for recent information, but most of the posts I was getting were from four or five years ago. I thought to myself, “Gee, Google ought to have a feature where you can limit the results by date.” For some reason, though, it didn’t occur to me to check their advanced search. It’s in there! But I’m in such a habit of relying on that single search field, I don’t think about doing something smarter with the results it gives me.
It occurs to me that the Advanced Search is typically downplayed in the UI. On Google’s homepage, it is a tiny link to the right of the search field grouped with two other links. Of course, I rarely visit Google’s homepage. I always start my searches directly from the search field in my browser. Once you have your list of results, you can then click the “Show options…” link at the top of the list to display a sidebar with options for filtering the results or changing the view, but I’ve never paid attention to that either, as it appears at the end of a little breadcrumb trail representing the scope of your search. I’ve never been encouraged by the UI to try the advanced search.
So now I’m wondering, do most people not use advanced search simply because we are advising them not to through the design of the user interface?
