[IxDA Discuss] "Browse engine" vs. Search engine?

[Robert Barlow-Busch]

Keyword search is lousy when you're exploring an entire category.  
Faceted navigation is pretty nice -- when it exists for the data  
you're interested in. Finding items when you need to express a few  
different requirements at the same time is... well, a disaster. We  
need better tools for browsing and comparing.

Can anyone point to examples of sites or applications that you feel  
do a good job at supporting this type of behavior? Got any thoughts  
on what would characterize a search/browse engine of this sort? I  
have two off the top of my head:

- the ability to express several different requirements at once - at  
the level of meta-data, not keywords.
- the ability to explore and compare "what-if" scenarios.

Here's the story-behind-the-story that drove me to ask this question.  
And yeah, I'm pretty frustrated at the moment. <reaches for black  
coffee>

I want to sign up my three kids for swimming lessons, which I can do  
online. There are many dozens of classes offered, at different times  
and at different local pools. It's impossible to express what I'm  
looking for and then perform a search on those criteria; instead,  
what's offered is a typical keyword search. This doesn't help when I  
need:

- three classes offered at the same time, or within 15 minutes of  
each other
- classes NOT offered during specific times when we aren't available
- two possibile course types for my middle daughter
- classes offered only in the "warm pool" for my young son

Every four months, it's the same thing: hours of wasted time as we  
create complex workarounds to document and analyze the possibilities.  
Surely this problem extends across many domains. So which domains  
have figured it out?

-- 
Robert Barlow-Busch
Practice Director, Interaction Design
Quarry Integrated Communications Inc.
rbarlowbusch at quarry.com
(519) 570-2020

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