Design patterns for Search

Question

I know this may sound very generic question, but I am forced to post this to understand different patterns of search. I am working on a content oriented site which contains various types articles/videos from different topics. The width of content is very broad which is spread across 5 different topics which are holding the entire taxonomy. Each article is tagged with keywords and the user can click the tags.

I have already considered using adaptable personalization technique to handle overload of content , (i.e) giving the right content at the right time by showing content of only subscribed topics. Now I want to provide a search feature & popular tags also for every topic. What would be best search design pattern for this kind of scenario. (Note; this is a responsive website).

Answer 1

The best reference I know of search patterns is Peter Morvilles and Jeffery Callenders book Search Patterns:

Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. This provocative and inspiring book explores design patterns that apply across the categories of web, e-commerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real time search and discovery. Using colorful illustrations and examples, the authors bring modern information retrieval to life, covering such diverse topics as relevance ranking, faceted navigation, multi-touch, and mixed reality. Search Patterns challenges us to invent the future of discovery while serving as a practical guide to help us make search applications better today.

It covers everything from search result pages design to best bets and user behaviour. Best book I've read on the topic.

I think you should start there...

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EDIT

To answer your particular question better, I think Microsoft have made a very good job filtering search results in SharePoint (as an example). You could filter by a numerous of different things which would be easely transferrable to your question tags and/or features. Take a look at the following image and see if there is something useful?!

Look specifically at the left column where the filters are... filter by type, date, product, company or concept.

Answer 2

You could leave the basic search functionality unchanged and embed a limited amount of featured and popular search results as an incentive to use the other search type. The end of the embeded results show a button to display "more results from featured/popular tags".

Taking into account that you mentioned your website to be responsive, you could offer users with more screen space a couple of featured search hits + button , possibly aside of the main content or preceeding the normal search results (left in the mockup). For users with less space, just show buttons to alternatively search from featured tags (right side in the mockup).

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}