Posts Tagged: Web search engine


10
Apr 10

Pagerank van Google; steeds meer zaak van back-end.

Search Engine Optimisation. Search Engine Opti...
Image by Hobo! via Flickr

Wie wil er nou niet op 1 staan in Google? Ik denk dat elke organisatie nu wel inziet dat de Google Ranking van hun site belangrijk is voor de concurrentiepositie. Tot op heden konden de meeste problemen wel opgelost worden door middel van content, maar de eisen aan de technische opbouw worden  steeds belangrijker. Een nieuwe factor sinds april is: snelheid. Continue reading →

Popularity: 18% [?]


5
Nov 09

Web elements: search-box

An eye-tracking Heatmap showing where a subjec...
Image via Wikipedia

Search is getting the dominant way to navigate trough the web.  The first web generation started out with a web-directory (the good old Yahoo, Altavista times), nowadays the start of every web-visit is search.  Websites changed a lot because of this. menu’s, sitemaps and breadcrumbs (the whole web experience) changed because the homepage of every website is not the usual landing page. A search-box is almost essential on every website.

Positioning of the search box

More websites are using a search-box the give users fast access to their information. Not only because websites are getting bigger, also because search is an automatic process. The “Google-Generation” does not care about menu’s they directly use the search-box to find the information they need, even if a website has just 5 pages.  To make the  search box accessible it needs to be on ‘the right spot’.
eye-tracking heatmaps tell us that most visitors are scanning a page in a ‘F’ figure. Two horizontal lines (mostly the horizontal menu and the first header) and a vertical line (a vertical menu). search-boxes are mostly places in the right-upper corner within this ‘F’.

Design of the search-box

Most search-boxes are just a text input field with a button to start search. Sometimes they got a ‘advanced’ search possibility. After examining loads of boxes I came to some general conclusions:

  • There seems to be a trend to filter a search-result after searching instead of offering an advanced search option.
  • Most searches give results with the search-term emphasized and placed in their context.
  • Wildcards like % and * are not used anymore.
  • Websites with a lots of content place a search-box in the center, and do not offer a classic menu anymore.

Examples of search boxes

yahoo_searchbox

wordpress_search

msn_search

myspace_search

twitter_search

ebay_search

flickr_search

digitalbuzz_search

cnn_search

wikipedia_search

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Popularity: 3% [?]