Usability : Searching

Resources

Date

Title

Developer

08/28/06

Use Old Words When Writing for Findability

Jakob Nielsen

Articles and White Papers

Familiar words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your site.

01/09/06

Search Engines as Leeches on the Web

Jakob Nielsen

Articles and White Papers

Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

09/26/05

The Power of Defaults

Jakob Nielsen

Articles and White Papers

Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings. Once again, people tend to stick to the defaults.

05/09/05

Mental Models For Search Are Getting Firmer

Jakob Nielsen

Articles and White Papers

Users now have precise expectations for the behavior of search. Designs that invoke this mental model but work differently are confusing.

08/16/04

When Search Engines Become Answer Engines

Jakob Nielsen

Articles and White Papers

The website is becoming a less prominent locus of experience as people use search engines to bring up answers to their current questions. How can sites cope with masses of freeloaders?

03/05/04

Re-Finding Found Things: An Exploratory Study of How Users Re-Find Information

Robert G. Capra and Manuel A. Perez-Quinones

Downloadable File

The problem of how people find information is studied extensively; however, the problem of how people organize, re-use, and re-find information that they have found is not as well understood.

06/30/03

Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster

Jakob Nielsen

Articles and White Papers

05/13/01

Search: Visible and Simple

useit.com: Jakob Nielsen’s Website

Articles and White Papers

07/15/97

Search and You May Find

useit.com: Jakob Nielsen’s Website

Articles and White Papers

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