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

[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.