Re: suggest: make searches efficient

["Joe Shaw" <joe joeshaw org>]

Hi,

On Jan 8, 2008 3:40 AM, Enrico Minack <minack l3s de> wrote:
> >   So I ask you for suggestions, how to make searches efficient ?
> though Beagle already arranges results into groups of types (Documents,
> EMails, Images, ...), it already displays the results inside these
> groups, so that the user may have to scroll down to find the actual
> interesting group. What if the first thing being shown are the groups /
> types of results, along with the number of hits:
> +--------------------------------------------------------+
> |                                                        |
> |      [Icon Docs]   [Icon EMails]  [Icon Images]        |
> |       (3 hits)       (20 hits)     (124 hits)          |
> |                                                        |
> +--------------------------------------------------------+
> and after selecting a group only the results of this one are shown
> below. So the first thing you see is in which section of your desktop
> you have hits. So you would not need to specify the type in the query
> but can select from the matching ones without being overwhelmed by the
> hits.

I think shortcuts like these are a good idea, but not at the expense
of showing any items at all.  You would effectively be adding an extra
click for every search, and the tradeoff would be sometimes not
needing to scroll.

So basically what I'm saying is that I like the idea, but we shouldn't
*require* clickthrough to get at the results.

> Another way is give information where the hits match the query, e.g. if
> in the subject or the title, the author field or the Text. This is
> similar to the facated view pointed to by Mikkel, recently.

Yeah, I like this idea.

Joe