single search box, my left frontal lobe!

[deborah]

Recently, I was talking to a non-librarian, non-techie friend about the "single search box" debate in librarianship, the idea that librarian's need to emulate the popular search engines.

She immediately responded "but Google doesn't have a single search box! Neither does Amazon!"

As she characterized it, she is well aware, as a naive user, of the difference between the various tabs on the Google front page: Web, Images, News, Usenet, Shopping -- and she uses them as she needs to. She is well aware of the difference between book and DVD searching in Amazon -- and uses them.

It would be good for librarians to remember that single search boxes do actually characterize information in different ways and don't just do keyword searching across a single massive collection. Perhaps the user interface preference should be leaning towards a Google-style text box on a tabbed screen as opposed to the exquisitely bad Wilson SilverPlatter interface, but we need to remember that Google isn't as simple as we think it is.

Comments

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

Fucking Wilson, man. InfoTrac and EBSCOHost, the two "periodicals" databases we use, aren't much better. There's no way to tell what you're searching, really, and you just get tons of results with no way to narrow it down. You can't drill down in any useful way. SUCK.

[deborah]

LEXIS-NEXIS is pretty wretched as well. Honestly, I think we have a lot to learn from user-friendly public interfaces, I just hope that we don't learn "users don't do smart search! Make it stupid!"

[cavlec.livejournal.com]

Interesting and well-stated. Maybe this is the better answer to metasearch.

[deborah]

it's pretty interesting. I think I had fallen into a dangerous librarian habit of underestimating what users are willing to do. I know that I insist on the ability to switch myself to the complicated search mechanisms, but I think we tend to default to thinking that users who use simple mechanisms aren't willing to think at all about what they're looking for, and I take this conversation as evidence that's not true. And users might not know jargon, and they might not be willing to pull through a bunch of dropdowns for Boolean search, but they're perfectly willing to distinguish between an image and a newspaper article and a web page and a scholarly article.