

Ask YC: Have you come across any good interface for a search engine? - cosmok

I have been pondering about  upgrading the interface on my search site and looking for some ideas/pointers here.<p>So does anyone here have links to a good search site that they have come across or someone here has a mockup of a search site that they would like to share?
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makecheck
ht://Dig (<http://www.htdig.org/>) was my favorite back before Google was big.
It hasn't been updated since the rise of Google, but it is still a very
configurable, nice search engine.

Google Custom Search is probably the best bet for any site. It has a free mode
for free organizations, and an ad-supported one otherwise.

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arnorhs
google.com

(somebody was bound to eventually ;D )

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SingAlong
"google.com" a one url reply. That should crack everyone up.

An ideal search site would have one input box and a submit box. And maybe the
logo too :D After the data is input, the design that comes to my mind again is
the linear results displayed by most search engines (except cuil). This is the
part where you can make a difference. If you don't mind about the business
model (or in specific ads) currently, then use the space on the right side
too. Use it to display thumbnails of the page. And along with the common
search data shown by other search engines, you could also display data about
the media in the page and even the type of page(flash or html etc). Any medi
in the page like mpg, wmv, asx etc can be mentioned in the results. Coz if a
person is searching for just test then that can be useful.

Also the thumbnails data I mentioned are of much use when doing quick surfing.
I wouldnt want to endup on some page that isn't readable.

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cosmok
'And along with the common search data shown by other search engines, you
could also display data about the media in the page and even the type of
page(flash or html etc)' Can you elaborate? Google does display type of link
for a few formats (pdf, doc, ppt, etc..), are you suggesting to recognise more
media types or just show the info about the site?

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SingAlong
Google recognises only document formats and shows them.

I meant recognising what the page actually contains? Is the page a simple HTML
page or a very heavy flash page. This would help people in low bandwidth
countries like Africa.

And it would be a lot better if you have a basic idea of what you want to
display and create an image mockup, post it here and ask for feedback (after
you get enough ideas from this thread). That would be the next thing you would
want to do I suppose. That way you would be able to get more inputs for a
close-to-perfect redesign. :)

Also, [http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-
Compute...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-
Science/6-831Fall-2004/CourseHome/index.htm)

Thats the link to the MIT User Interface Design course from MIT OCW. Refer
that for a better UI.

I heard from somewhere that placing the labels of input fields on top of the
input fields increases speed of readability than when you put the labels of
the input fields on the left. (I don't remember the source but I remember the
content right)

Hope that helps!

Ah! if this is your blog: <http://www.trk7.com/blog/about/> I can shoot you a
mockup to your email address. :) Is it okie to do it?

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cosmok
thank you for the links. Please do e-mail your mockup, greatly appreciated.

