When does make sense to automatically fill a search box?

Question

On every Stack Exchange site, when somebody clicks on a user link, the search box is automatically filled with a string that would allow to search posts written by that user.

In which cases does automatically filling the search field make sense? Should I just consider if searching is a common operation, or are there other considerations to make?

I was thinking to implement such functionality on a Drupal site, for the user profile pages, or the node pages. In the first case, the search box would be pre filled with a search term that allows searching for nodes (content) written by that user; in the second case, the search box would be filled with a search term that allows searching for similar nodes.

Answer 1

Automatic fill in of search boxes makes sense when the user have made a selection on a web site. This could be a specific user, a group of users or some other refined part of content. As an example there are 5000+ questions on UX.SE. There are too many questions to browse through, and the user might want to find a specific topic, like website-design.

It the user hits the tag website-design, it makes perfect sense to add this tag to the search query within the search box – and the user narrows the search by 90 % to 544 questions.

Still too many, but the user can now further refine the search by adding extra search terms, such as the example below we add “windows” and find 43 questions tagged website-design having the word windows in the content (or as another tag).

The benefit is that the user intuitively knows that this is the proper way to search for content, and can elaborate further on the next search.