Conal Tuohy wrote:
> The Google Toolbar also provides a similar UI, Bernard. Have you used it?
>
> As you type into the search box, it shows a list of words beginning with the text you've typed. It's nice in that the list of keywords is updated as you type each character (well, asynchronously, actually, but pretty fast). It's quite different to the experience of searching and getting "did you mean X"? Or just having the search engine ASSUME that you meant X.
>
Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
> I'm afraid that's not the same concept at all. What it does is present a
> few suggestions of highly used keywords.
I take your point entirely, and I didn't mean to imply that were the same in that particular way. I meant to point to their similarities as navigational devices, and (implicitly) to suggest that the asynchronicity of Google's UI was something worth having in library systems too.
To compare the different UIs: the Google toolbar is a native Windows application embedded in a browser. It shows a short (and fixed!) list of search terms drawn either from the content of your own bookmarks, your own search history, or from the most popular searches of the great unwashed (presumably excluding popular spelling mistakes, though). The list is updated asynchronously, as you type, and it's sorted by some mysterious metric of Google's. Frequencies are shown in brackets after each suggested search.
The Verbundkatalog example by contrast is a HTML-based website. It can show a short page of keywords drawn from the actual catalog records. The list can be paged backwards and forwards with "next" and "previous" hyperlinks. The page update is synchronous. The keywords are sorted alphabetically. Frequency statistics for each keyword are shown in brackets.
I haven't noticed this feature on Google's main website (only in the toolbar), but I'd be surprised if it didn't appear at some point, using AJAX to populate the "q" input field. Is there much AJAX to be seen on library websites? Any interfaces like in Bernhard's example, but using AJAX?
Received on Tue Aug 07 2007 - 05:51:30 EDT