Ask YC: Have you come across any good interface for a search engine? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Have you come across any good interface for a search engine?

1 pointcosmok7 comments

I have been pondering about upgrading the interface on my search site and looking for some ideas/pointers here.

So does anyone here have links to a good search site that they have come across or someone here has a mockup of a search site that they would like to share?

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ht://Dig (http://www.htdig.org/) was my favorite back before Google was big. It hasn't been updated since the rise of Google, but it is still a very configurable, nice search engine.

Google Custom Search is probably the best bet for any site. It has a free mode for free organizations, and an ad-supported one otherwise.

google.com

(somebody was bound to eventually ;D )

Well, actually... that takes me to my iGoogle pages, and you know, with the latest redesign... * starts bitching about minor unimportant things while ignoring the general benefits of the iGoogle homepage redesign :D

"google.com" a one url reply. That should crack everyone up.
An ideal search site would have one input box and a submit box. And maybe the logo too :D After the data is input, the design that comes to my mind again is the linear results displayed by most search engines (except cuil). This is the part where you can make a difference. If you don't mind about the business model (or in specific ads) currently, then use the space on the right side too. Use it to display thumbnails of the page. And along with the common search data shown by other search engines, you could also display data about the media in the page and even the type of page(flash or html etc). Any medi in the page like mpg, wmv, asx etc can be mentioned in the results. Coz if a person is searching for just test then that can be useful.
Also the thumbnails data I mentioned are of much use when doing quick surfing. I wouldnt want to endup on some page that isn't readable.

'And along with the common search data shown by other search engines, you could also display data about the media in the page and even the type of page(flash or html etc)' Can you elaborate? Google does display type of link for a few formats (pdf, doc, ppt, etc..), are you suggesting to recognise more media types or just show the info about the site?

Google recognises only document formats and shows them.
I meant recognising what the page actually contains? Is the page a simple HTML page or a very heavy flash page. This would help people in low bandwidth countries like Africa.
And it would be a lot better if you have a basic idea of what you want to display and create an image mockup, post it here and ask for feedback (after you get enough ideas from this thread). That would be the next thing you would want to do I suppose. That way you would be able to get more inputs for a close-to-perfect redesign. :)
Also, http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
Thats the link to the MIT User Interface Design course from MIT OCW. Refer that for a better UI.
I heard from somewhere that placing the labels of input fields on top of the input fields increases speed of readability than when you put the labels of the input fields on the left. (I don't remember the source but I remember the content right)
Hope that helps!
Ah! if this is your blog: http://www.trk7.com/blog/about/ I can shoot you a mockup to your email address. :) Is it okie to do it?

thank you for the links. Please do e-mail your mockup, greatly appreciated.

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