User blog comment:Daniel Baran/Search Developments: Big Picture/@comment-3508190-20120508232616

Thank you, Daniel, for letting us know what goes on behind the scenes! Dopp's recent blog post about the new search features drew quite a lot of ire. I do think you (the Wikia team) would have found all of us a lot more receptive to your improvements, if you had told us back then, that you switched the actual search engine and how and why. Of course there's a lot problems in the beginning. That is to be expected. We would have calmly helped you list the areas where the new engine is not quite good enough yet and patiently waited until everything worked fine. That's not exactly what happened, is it? Please, tell us about these things before we get all worked up!

Having said that: The changes to the search interface are still a matter of contention. Allow me to make a list of the clever ideas I spotted in the other thread:

1.) Adding two buttons to the search dialog instead of one: A "go" button - which is connected to enter/return - that takes you directly to the best match. And a "more" button that takes you to a results page. Eladkse's hack already shows that idea in action and it works perfectly.

2.) Ralok, Rappy and possibly others have suggested to add a small dialog to the page you land on after the search - after hitting the "go" button or enter/return that is. That dialog would ask you if this page was indeed the one you were looking for and provide a shortcut to the search results page.

3.) And here comes the shameless plug of my own idea: You could add a few more "You might also be interested in..." links to that post-search dialog. That would preserve the original idea of your interface change - which I understood as wanting to give the visitor the opportunity to stumble over things he/she might find interesting but may not have (directly) searched for.

Please consider at least 1.) and 2.) Thank you!