Out of the Search Darkness

"A harrowing tale of one man facing his search daemons"  Sergey Brin

9 out of 10 technical projects which fail is because of badly thought out and executed search. Okay, that number is a piece of fiction; but, my hopefully empathetic friend, that is how I feel; because yet again I am fighting the same old user experience battles when it comes to designing search.

I think the root cause of search atrocities is, like most heinous and tyrannical acts, due to ignorance combined with wild ambition. Let's stuff everything cool we've ever seen on any site that I've ever dun a search on and then it should be wickid, yeah? No. What about fuzzy.. No. What about nice mix of facetted did you means? No. What abou... No. No. No.

Now, before I cast myself in a dubious light of technological pessimism and creativity bashing egotism, let me take you down the river on a journey of exploration and discovery into tech rash's top dos and donts when designing and building search.

A Rough Guide: Software Specification

Software Development can be like going on a holiday to somewhere new. You always run the risk of getting very little sun, potentially ending up in a grotty hotel or getting messed up by muggers and left groaning and penniless in a filthy, urine saturated alleyway. So how do we avoid this scenario and make this holiday the one where we meet up with our new found holiday friends, knock back a few nostalgic caipirinhas and congratulate each other on what a brilliant time we all had?