If you run a blog, there should be a search box somewhere on the site

I might have written another post about this — it might have been Baseball Prospectus — where I described the issue where search was confusing because there were too many different ways. In their case it’s probably a technical issue because they’re on some custom hacked together content management system.

Six Revisions is different: they’re on WordPress, which has search right out of the box (notice the search box I have on this site, nice and big). Yet, there’s no way to search the site except through using google. It’s really disappointing, because the content is off the charts, and I was going to find a Photoshop article along the lines of their Illustrator article to send to a friend, but I can’t. I have to browse through their archives; this increases page views, but I don’t want to take the time.

It’s simple: blog readers sometimes want to see what’s on the inside, and the easiest way to do it is either through free form search, or through tag clouds.

Search should be intuitive

I watch baseball. A lot of baseball. And I’m in a fantasy league, so I read a lot alot about baseball. Because of this Baseball Prospectus is a site I subscribe to because the content is top-notch analysis. If though it doesn’t help me much, there’s a lot of information about teams and players that’s very insightful.

That’s what I like.

What I don’t like is their search interface — it’s hard to figure out how to get to certain articles, and everything is separated. Click on the search link above, and it sends you to a complex advanced search page. Finding a player is pretty self explanitory, but the Audit Team doesn’t mean anything to me.

Remember, users are looking for one search box, and it should be designed to intuitively go to results based on what they expect. In this case, I would expect a search box that would show me all results (“Google-style”), and then I could filter on players based on direct and indirect matches. What is here now doesn’t work for me.

Where’s The Search Box?

Hulu‘s a pretty good site — lots of video from companies that want some kind of control over the content, which is much more than YouTube is giving them. The site’s is version 1.0, so the interface feels a bit clunky. Most importantly, where’s the search box?

I made the screen capture small without a highlight for the primary reason that if you are on a content-heavy site, that search box better be easy to find. Like Google easy to find. Like YouTube easy to find. Like News.com easy to find.

Can you find it?