Posted on 13th November 2023
The Search Engine: A product design iteration
Designing a decent search interface is a tough nut to crack. Search is an area I have worked in intensively as a software engineer in the past. So I have an appreciation of the variety of approaches, trade-offs and the complexity of the problem.
With specialised search it is often easier to hone in on a solution that hangs together well. Generalised search (what we traditionally call a 'search engine' such as Google) is particularly problematic. As soon as the web had the capability and infrastructure to serve up a variety of digital goods, rather than static pages, pandoras box was opened and web page search become everything search. That's when search engine user experience started to deteriorate, as I've already explored.
How 'everything search' complicates... well everything
Since my last post on the topic I've done more research and tried sketching a few designs of my own. What I discovered is that this transition between web search and everything search was a great opportunity to capitalise on the broadening potential of the web. To some extent Google did achieve this, but at some cost to the UX of their search engine, particularly on desktop devices. In fact the desktop versions of most major search engines today don't even resize properly!
What's worse is these tech companies are now jumping ahead into the world of AI without fixing fundamental issues with existing products. For some time now search has been seen as no longer sexy, and the core search experience has been left to wither on the vine, rather than given the nurturing it needs. Now most search engines are either infused with AI (which further complicates their interfaces) or solutions like chat interfaces are being pushed as an alternative panacea.
How 'everything search' needn't be complicated
The more I look at the 'problem' the more I see the use of a search engine as something we can simplify back into a more usable 'product'. Sure most organisations offering search engines are large technology companies that have their fingers in many pies. So of course they want to own your digital journey and help you achieve all of your goals. Ultimately though the web is still the same medium: it may offer many different levels of interaction, but fundamentally you are always searching for information on a web page, regardless of the intent.
There are vastly diverse contexts that accompany today's search engine usage. Rather than attempting to solve it by cramming features into an already complex product, what if we embraced this as an opportunity to unify the interface and give control back to the user to achieve their goals?
As a caveat: I've done no proper user research here. But I need to practise a whole range of skills and techniques if I'm to become a better designer and the ideation and creation of prototypes is one of those things. So I did a lot of sketching and eventually came up with the following:
The layout is fixed, the size and location of the search results are fixed and the interface remains consistent. The only things that are dynamic are the top 5 categories matching the search results, which are displayed as filters on the left-hand side of the screen. The remaining categories are displayed below them in a fixed order.
It's not perfect. In many ways it's only subtly different from search UIs we already have. All I've done is try to retain some of the useful new abilities of the modern search engine but hide the actual complexity of them, and more importantly made the layout consistent. I think going back to something with this kind of simplicity is worth investigating and search is still worth investing in.
Personally I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine and I find it to be a good enough to satisfy my needs. I'm open to alternatives but one thing is for sure: It would take a huge amount convincing for me to go back to Google or Bing to search the web, and I have a feeling I'm not the only one...
If you're interested, I've also written about the concept of website categories and directories which used to be a prominent feature in web search engines.