The development of the elections portal is winding down, and we have already begun to put together the infrastructure to replace search. I have put the feature up for discussion a few times already, and would now love your feedback on our interface design.
Search is a feature with many possible use cases. It is the interface of last resource for those lost or new to Daily Kos; it is quick access to specific content for those with a good memory for identifying details; it is a way to navigate the site content directly without navigating through the sites structure… its a way to find things.
Fortunately, many of these use cases look similar to each other in practice. In fact, I think there are two modes. The first is simply: enter a keyword, or maybe a few, and see what you get— search should be able to provide you with a list of relevant content. In this case you might not have a specific story or comment you are looking for, instead you have an interest, say “Obama Organizer Chicago” and want to know what Daily Kos writers and activists have had to say on the topic. Search’s graphical interface is built around these use cases.
The second is the needle in the haystack search— you are looking for a specific item on the site. You might remember any of a number of different types of information about it— who wrote it and roughly when, fo
r example, or that it was a comment somebody made in a story on the topic of The Trans-Pacific Partnership. There are a large number of dimensions to search, so instead of complicating the graphical user interface, we’ve built an advanced search text based query language for this use case. I’ll cover it in another story.
As for the interface itself, you’ll notice that it differs from the existing search in several ways. It will return results of any type— story, comment, user, groups, tags, or petitions— though it can be limited in type by choosing the appropriate tab. Each type of content has a different visual style, so that they can be easily picked out. Results are sorted by relevance by default, but can be sorted by other fields as well, for example reverse chronological by created_at date. They can also be limited to a specific date
If you haven’t stopped reading by this point, you’re probably the type who earlier asked themselves just what is meant here by ‘relevant’ search results. We plan to launch with just two changes to Elastic Search’s default relevancy algorithm- boosts for recs and recency. The former because recs are a good indicator of quality and the latter because this is a news site.
So, please take a moment and see if what you think of the design. Would you be able to find what your looking for?
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