Great article… Every day I fire up Excel and Visual Studio to write C++ XLL Excel addins; and today’s DOS Search box just hurts so much. I thought Microsoft were going to build an installed app with lots of complexity, Live Search almost deserves to fail for its lack of inventiveness. On you points: How about two search boxes so I can put a context and subject. Then we can avoid the multiple tabs. And how about showing me the Topic in the search results and if the engine is onto the wrong idea I can right click and remove similar entries. We can do better… Bill said Today Search is Nothing – well do something about it then.

I just want to chime in with garypool here. The book analogy is great. This all has to do with the way our written language works. For non-information-rich uses of language, all sorts of different presentations might be effective or interesting, but what we are trying to do when we read a book is get the information into our brains. This is the same reason we’ve been using such similar character sets for so long for reading – display and special effect fonts can be wacky, but for hours of reading we want classic serif fonts. Search is a verbal process for the most part, so effective display of results is going to be blocks or columns of text. In my experience, anything else is just annoying. As for the input field, well, it could be round instead of rectangular but this would be pretty gratuitous! I guess you see some non-linear but still verbal interfaces, like tag clouds. But these only work for general concepts – and I am suspicious that from an informational point of view this type of presentation is better than just a column of terms with the ‘biggest’ at the top. Think about how fast you can get through a half dozen search engine results pages and get a good idea of the content of all those sites. It’s all down to scanning that text. There is a case to be made for creativity when it comes to searching for different things, such as the map example or images or whatever, but 90-some% of what we are searching for is verbal I think.

The screen shots are great and speak to usability. People know how to use the simple fill in the box form on the search query. The book hasn’t changed over the years either but the way the book is made has. The way search engines have changed a lot but the interface has basically remained the same. I think this speaks for usability. If it works why try to fix it? As far as the results go the new style interfaces are fun but they all have a learning curve. I’m glad there are designers out there who like to push the envelope. It is fun to use these new results interfaces. You can call me old and stuffy but I prefer to use the time true method of linear results for actual information.

Great collection of screen shots.
It’s hard to imagine the query field changing. How else can users tell the search engine their goal? Possibly there will be ways to spur users to provide greater detail in the query that could aid in presenting relevant results. I love assisted query completion like Kayak has because I never remember those darn airport codes and I’m a terrible speller. I think there are some possibilites in this area that can be explored.
I’ll use Kayak again as an example of what can be done on a SERP. I think they have made great strides in delivering relevance by enabling more user control of the results. So much so that Yahoo has copied them. Of course it’s much easier for them as a vertical engine to deliver relevance but if there is one thing that threatens the big engines it is better user experiences elsewhere, namely verticals.

Google Co-op might be a good way to augment Google with human expertise