It’s just struck me that the current search presentation is a little inefficient.
If I search for a term and none the top five suggested results match my query, I’ll click through to see the full results, only to be presented with the same five results. This would make sense to some degree if Discourse were presenting an expanded view of those topics, but it isn’t, those excerpts are identical. Actually worse than identical, because the fifth result visible in the first screenshot falls off the bottom.
The user has to scroll a whole additional screen before more results are visible.
I guess this could go one of two ways, presenting more of each post, or just landing the user at result six, but indicating that the initial five search results are still available above.
Caveats: This obviously doesn’t apply to mobile as the search preview doesn’t exist, and screen resolution/scaling is definitely a factor here. I’ve observed the issue on the internal display of my 16" MacBook Pro, the attached 4k panel at default resolution scaling, and my Thinkpad X1 carbon. If I crank the resolution scaling on the 4k panel to the smallest, then the first five results only occupy the top 50% of a full-height window, but aside from select power users is anyone doing that?
Note: I’m still a big RSS user and always appreciate it when links to read more of an article take me to the rest of the article, rather than dropping me at the top and making me scroll back to wherever I last landed. Kudos to Ars amongst others for the user-friendliness there.
I jump right away to the list of hits. Just because quite rarely a hit I’m searching for is one of the first five. My style is
opening a hit and then coming back
opening several tabs
If I find myself looking at 6th hit I have to scroll back to up. And if I’ll open a hit from quick results I can’t come back to search, but to that page where I was.
So from my point of view removing quick hits would be better choise.
That is quite easy task indeed. But trying to guess what the metric tells… that is another story. We don’t know if fast or slow moving away from quick results happends because of
learned habbit
trying to make one’s mind if one of results will answer to question
one doesn’t understand totally what hits tell
trying to figure out better search terms
taking a coffee break
But it could be true when one has spended longer time looking at the first five she/he propably doesn’t need to see same results again.
Still… I would like to see similar results than Google and every other search egines offer. And it is more familiar to everyone. And more reliable too.
