We’re beginning the process of rebuilding search. Our current version, written by the wonderful volunteer Jotter, has had a good run, but there are more modern tools with which to build site search available now. So, we are going to rebuild and redesign search, and we would love your help designing a better interface.
Search sits at an interesting place in the design of the site— it is both an expert’s tool for finding a particular comment among the tens of millions we have on Daily Kos, and an interface of last resort for those lost or new to the site and looking for something they thought would be right on the front page. So, there’s a diverse set of needs the interface has to satisfy.
We are hoping to get a deeper understanding of how search is used. I asked some questions along these lines a while back, but certainly things have shifted at least a bit since then. Please let us know how you use search— from simply finding an old story, to complex queries, to building regularly appearing stories for the site. Do you fall back to searching Daily Kos with google? If so, why and what searches do you do there that you can’t do now on Daily Kos directly? How we could extend or alter search to better help you find what you are looking for.
To kick things off, here is a current list the designer pulled together of possible user goals.
As a user I would like…
- To Find story results with a single keyword or multiple keywords
- To Edit or refine my query after I have submitted my initial query and have not found what I was looking for
- To Find story results with a single #tag or multiple #tags
- To Find tags by submitted them as written queries (tag summary result)
- To Use keywords to call sorting filters (story titles, author, exact phrase, links, location)
- To Find users by name and username
- To Be recommended possible keyword matches via autocomplete to complete my query
- To Be recommended possible page results via autocomplete that takes me directly to the content page (user profile for example)
- To Limit results to a specific date range DD/MM/YYYY—DD/MM/YYYY
- To Limit results to comments and find by author, subject text, comment text
- To Limit results to content that contains a video
- To Sort results by recommends, date, relevancy, FB likes?
- Be presented with content that may be relevant when no results are found
- Have my search results organized into chunks (News, Community Blogs, Community Groups, Authors, Tags, Elections Data, Images)
I’m also aware that search powers the
High Impact Stories series that Jotter publishes daily. Are there other similar regularly appearing features that rely on particular reports or features of search?
We will also be working on the image search embedded in the image library. For extra credit, what changes are needed there?