Searching With Invisible Tabs

At present, Google has four tabs: Web, Images, Groups and Directory to help users target searches by kind. With services that it already offers, Google could easily add News, Shopping, University, Government, PhoneBook, Answers, and Catalogs to these. And if rumors are true, it could add Books, Chat, and Blogs search tabs. How about computer specific tabs such as BSD, Apple, and Microsoft? That's 17 right there and the author of the article "Searching With Invisible Tabs" speculates that "without some type of radical change, that's where Google and other search engines are headed."

"Don't get me wrong about tabs," says SearchEngineWatch.com editor Danny Sullivan, "I like them, in as much as they represent a particular specialty search that can be performed. Many times, people would be far better off performing a search that taps into a specialized collection of material rather than trying a web search." However, most people have "tab blindness" -- they don't even register that a tab exists and they certainly don't use it. The solution "is for the search engines to make use of 'invisible tabs,' where they make the correct choice for the user, behind the scenes."

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3115131
(SearchEngineWatch.com 2 Dec 2003)

These invisible tabs automatically categorize your query and deliver results within that category. AskJeeves and others already do it to a degree. Test AskJeeves against Google for "pictures of DNA." AskJeeves delivers images; Google offers a list of URLs. "It's not rocket science to see your query and decide that it makes sense to push the invisible image tab for you. But the change it produces, and perceived relevance to me, is dramatic."

To avoid frustrating searchers by, say, returning shopping lists instead product reviews, the search engine might come back with questions formatted as listings: "What would you like to do? Show me prices for this product from merchants across the Web; Show me product reviews from across the Web; Show me general matching content from across the Web."

Posted by Tom on December 11, 2003