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










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