Compact search bar design on top navigation bar for multiple pages?

Question

Consider a website that categorizes its data into about three classes. For example, a website contains food information only for fruits, vegetables, and meat products. I have designed a search bar on the main page to be like this:

Users can search keywords in text descriptions, tags, or user profiles.

For an individual subcategory like the "Explore fruits" page, I have two questions.

1. For the fruits page, should I let the user search only information inside the "fruits" category, or should I design the search function to search all global information? What is the general rule about this?

2. I would like a simple and modern design, but I cannot figure out a way to squeeze "< Back" button in and keep the style. I know this is kind of a design question but I cannot find a more related StackExchange site for UI design questions.

Answer 1

1. I think it depends entirely on your layout. Your search should only affect the items underneath it. For example, in this situation, since you are on a "Explore Fruits" page I would assume that you can only search for fruits. On the other hand, if your "Explore Fruits" page contains other items mixed in for some reason i.e. meats, then I would assume the search feature relates to every item on the list. Do not have a global search feature if it is not a global list.

2. Im assuming this is for mobile, in which case the back button should be in the top left corner. If you are worried about it affecting your style, you can create a header and add the back button there to separate it from your design.

Answer 2

For the first question, there are application search engines that categorize the results according to the finding location, in the case described it would be finds located within the Fruits section and general finds.

Search results in "Fruits":

• Result#1
• Result#2
• Result#3
  

---

General search results:

• Result#1
• Result#2
• Result#3
  

The second question is a dup of this one.