This article looks at how search interfaces and result displays affect the interactions with search engines - both web based as well as enterprise search interfaces.

Google has led the minimalist revolution in search interfaces that has almost forced everybody to look at search from a very simple and clean interface perspective (even MSN Search or a far off Sensis could not resist the temptation!), which helped the users in getting clutter free search experience. So far so good; but what happens when Google the king of simple interfaces needs to expand? Oddly enough Google has cleaned up even whatever was left on the home page. It replaced it search tabs with links, making almost "bare" minimalist.

In the light of Goggle's minimalist search interface revolution, the question that needs some inquiry is how search interfaces allow information to be displayed in a particular manner and what that means for the users as they interact with this information? Maybe restricting our attention to just Google will be limiting the scope of this article.

Most of the search engines provide the following components on their search interfaces:

List view	Almost all of the search engines offer a list of search results, ranked and numbered mostly on the basis of relevance or date. This is usually available through advanced interfaces. Ranked list view of search result display seems to be a dominant metaphor in search interfaces - a metaphor that represents a top to bottom and hierarchical view of information. This is something that is so ingrained in our view of information. Since it is so familiar it makes it very easy to navigate and use. One down side of this view is that only the first few results are seen by the user and as we saw in the last article, since the information ranking done by search engines is still not very reliable, there is a huge possibility that what you are looking for is lost in those thousands or hundreds of thousands of results that you do not see when you search for something. List view is not just limited to web, even in enterprise search this metaphor seems to be very dominant.
Title, Text Snippet or Summary	Now most search engines offer a text snippet with search terms high lighted in the text snippet, a tradition not started but popularized by Google, so searchers get a preview of the web page. Many enterprise search engines use technologies that automatically generate summaries of documents.
Other information about the URL	Search engines offer other information like "cache" or saved copy of the web page or the URL. Google offers information like "similar pages"; others offer ability to view pages in new windows or inline preview of the web pages (Vivisimo), so that you don't have to open a new window to see the page. Besides this, search engines offer update time (Google), RSS feed if available (Yahoo), File types, ability etc. In the enterprise search environment taxonomies and date wise selection is very common.

Visual Search and Search Engine Interfaces

It is important to understand the juxtaposition of ideas of Visual Search, Information Visualization and search interfaces. K-Praxis had looked at Visual Search at length in earlier articles -- Visual Search in the Context of Information Visualization and Grokker: Visual Search and Information Visualization that defined visual search as follows:

Broadly speaking, information visualization is a graphical presentation for manipulating information extracted from a larger document corpus or an information database. This ability to represent information in a graphical user interface enables users to understand and grasp the information faster, recognize and discover meaningful trends, patterns and important information clusters. This provides the user with more actionable information, adding to his/her decision-making capacity. So information visualization in a way shifts the focus of information retrieval to information processing from the lexical to the spatial and visual sphere.

Visual search - used either for web information retrieval or for non-internet information retrieval, is then the ability to browse search results by using 2D or 3D color graphics and animation. These search results can reveal the structure of information giving it a spatial dimension allowing users to navigate and interact with it in a completely different way than text-based results.

Interestingly some of the examples given in the articles Visual Search in the Context of Information Visualization and Grokker: Visual Search and Information Visualization do try to present a different method of providing search results in a visual format (KarToo, Anacubis, WebBrain Google Browser, Browse3D, Google Viewer, MapStan and Grokker)

Attempts at alternative Search Interfaces

There have been several attempts done by a growing community of designers and usability experts known as "information architects" and by the search engines themselves. Google Viewer mentioned above is a good example that allowed to view Google results as a slide show or Vivisimo that clustered results for better organization. In case of Vivisimo, it is only regrouping results from other search engines - no doubt a valuable service - but managing both information retrieval and clustering could be a difficult proposition. See how Find.com is struggling with or attempting to have a go at this idea in its attempt to offer different view of results.

Ask Jeeves has also recently introduced a new preview tool in the form of a binoculars icon next to the result link. Bringing your cursor over it gives you a preview of the page. But apart from these experimentations, the list view seems to be dominant across the Internet.

In the enterprise search arena companies like Inxight (StarTree) do provide some ways of information visualization but even there the list view seems to be the dominant way of displaying search results.

Future of Interfaces

The Wired Magazine recently as part of its coverage of Google Mania asked various artists to redraw Google Interface ; but the best interface that came out of this experiment - done by Joshua Davis seemed like it has nothing to do with how a user will interact with a search engine but more like an information designer's or information architect's fantasy of what Google might look like.

New ways of thinking about how information from search results to be presented to the users are required and at least this point Google seems to be ruling the roost as far as interfaces are concerned. Interestingly however, shopping search on the Internet seems to have gone for more a categorized view of information since it is dealing with individual shopping items rather documents that can be very multi-thematic.