7 nice search interfaces

• ering
• July 31st, 2008
• 11:42:41 AM

It’s getting to that point in the project where I need to add a design element, thus far, unaccounted for. This is where it gets tricky. How do I keep the new element consistent with everything else? What if the thing I had not accounted for is conceptually and functionally different than everything else, but it’s totally necessary? How can I deal with this? How can anybody?? Why is life so hard??? etc etc.

I’m talking about search. I decided to leave it for one the last things to take care of because it’s better to know all the types of content that will need to be searched before you go ahead and design a search.

Search is a pretty common feature in websites and web apps these days, and it’s sad that most search result pages are unattractive, don’t match the rest of the site and contain lots of sponsored results. We’re not all Google, people. So basically, most of them were pretty horrendous; here’s a few that stood out as “not horrendous.”