New functions to sparkle the search
In
the coming days as the trend goes , there are two things which is likely to boost
up the search mechanism, one is Accent Folding functionality in search field and the other one is faceted search. In the
realm of usability this two would be the main hubbub and certainly would made
an impact in the days to come (short period) .
Accent Folding functionality in search field
Accent
folding functionality will help users in various ways. Softwares , apps or
websites would just not be internationalized but with the easy support of Unicode
they would appear as truly multilingual. Let me now explain how does this helps
user to an extent and what’s so big about this commotion. Okay today `s users
deal with data from everywhere, in multiple languages and locales, all the
time. The locale they prefer is only loosely correlated with the locales they expect
applications to process. Suppose you type “caf”
thinking about the café in back of your mind. If you are an Englishman it is ok
to appear cafe but if you are a Frenchman you would expect the auto filler
result to appear as café.
Now
in application of search that favour recall over precision and displays the
both. for example, if you type ‘caf’ it will show all the options varied to different
languages such as café , cafe çåFé
etc. Remember, accents are pronunciation
hints that don’t affect the textual meaning. Entering them can be cumbersome,
especially on mobile devices and with accent-folding, it doesn't matter whether
users search for cafe, café or even çåFé; the results will be the same.
Now
technically an accent-folding function essentially maps Unicode characters to ASCII
equivalents. Anywhere you apply case-folding, you should consider
accent-folding, and for exactly the same reasons. A minor gotcha is the Unicode
"fullwidth" Roman alphabet. These are fixed-width versions of plain
ASCII characters designed to line up with Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters
(e.g., "1979年8月15日").
They reside in 0xff00 to 0xff5e and should be treated as equivalent to their
ASCII counterparts.
Be aware that there are million caveats to
accent rules. You will almost certainly get it wrong for somebody, somewhere.
Faceted
search
Faceted search or guided navigation provides
users the value of visible
options for clarifying and refining queries. It features an integrated,
incremental search and browse experience that lets users begin with a classic
keyword search and then scan a list of results. The user can see a custom navigational
map providing insights to the content and offers a variety of useful next steps . Example as follows.
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