Designing Search (part 6): Manipulating results by Tony Russell-Rose.
From the post:
One of the key insights to emerge from research into human information seeking is that search is more than just finding: in fact, search tasks of any complexity involve iteration across a number of levels of task context. From information retrieval at the lowest level to work task at the highest, searchers engage in a whole host of activities or search modes in the pursuit of their goals.
Of course, locating (known) items may be the stereotypical search task with which we are all familiar – but it is far from being the only one. Instead, for many search tasks we need to analyse, compare, verify, evaluate, synthesize… in short, we need to manipulate and interact with the results. While the previous post focused on informational features, our concern here is with interactivity. In this post, we consider techniques for managing and manipulating search results.
Not only does Tony have advice on “best practices,” but it is illustrated with real world examples.