single search box, my left frontal lobe!
Recently, I was talking to a non-librarian, non-techie friend about the "single search box" debate in librarianship, the idea that librarian's need to emulate the popular search engines.
She immediately responded "but Google doesn't have a single search box! Neither does Amazon!"
As she characterized it, she is well aware, as a naive user, of the difference between the various tabs on the Google front page: Web, Images, News, Usenet, Shopping -- and she uses them as she needs to. She is well aware of the difference between book and DVD searching in Amazon -- and uses them.
It would be good for librarians to remember that single search boxes do actually characterize information in different ways and don't just do keyword searching across a single massive collection. Perhaps the user interface preference should be leaning towards a Google-style text box on a tabbed screen as opposed to the exquisitely bad Wilson SilverPlatter interface, but we need to remember that Google isn't as simple as we think it is.
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gnomicutterance) wrote,
