Searching for items in breadcrumbs and displaying them in flat list

Question

We've got a highly structured hierarchy, which can be navigated using breadcrumbs. It does contain same keyword in some edge cases.

So imagine that our hierarchy looks like this:

1. Beer
   • Beer By Type
     • Beer Type 1
     • Beer Type 2
     • Beer Type 3
   • Beer By Origin
     • Beer Origin 1
     • Beer Origin 2
     • Beer Origin 3
     • Beer Origin 4
     • Beer Origin 5

And so on. There are some edge cases where we have around 500 categories with Beer in its name.

Now the issue is that our system can run a search in this hierarchy and present a flat list of categories.

It works fine, if user is quite specific or sub-hierarchy is not too nested, however users are left out without context (path to specific category) and it gets even worse when you're getting 500 categories back in this edge case.

Sample use case:

1. User types in a search box
2. User gets list below
3. Imagine what happens if there are over 500 categories
4. Pardon my mockup skills

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

How would someone fix it by adding context to each item and not overwhelming user with tons of selections?

Answer 1

Instead of forcing a way of reaching a item/category, I would try the oppossite, first show the childs and filter by its parents. There's something e-commerce sites do.

Just show the most relevant results (most popular, most selled, etc) and let the users filter afterwards.

For example, Ebay uses a left panel for category filter, offers "related searchs" at the top and a dropdown for category search too.

The important thing is to give the users choices and paths to get to the results they want to keep it natural for them, you can't do magic if there are thousands results.

Additionally you could be the users the chance to "pin" a certain category so they can later access it directly.