From http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/designing-search-checklist
Recently on projects I’ve found myself designing a number of search results pages. While each project has its own set of requirements and nuances, I think there are a handful of elements that should be included in most all result page interfaces. If you start out with this list, and then tweak as your situation requires, I think you’ll end up with a pretty good page.
Here are the items on my checklist, in no particular order:
- Highlight the query term in the results.
- Restate the query on the results page.
- Show the number of results that were found.
- Include next and previous buttons, as well as links to additional pages, to move through results. These should be smartly linked; no link on previous if you are on the first page and so on.
- Include a query box so the user can search again.
- Don’t show the URLs of the result pages, unless your audience is techy enough to derive meaning from the URL.
- Have meaningful page titles and descriptions for each result.
- The page title should be the link to the result.
- Allow sorting and refinement tools if appropriate for your users and content.
- Indicate if a result is not a regular page (e.g., a PDF file).
* Directory crowding - don’t let one source of hits crowd out the results, show a sample and link to more.
* Spellchecking - no longer a luxury, it allows users to get close enough to a search result, especialy proper nouns.
* Keymatch results - for those times when you can infer from the query what users are most likely looking for.
Interestingly, if you add the Page Rank algorithm to your list, you’ve got Google.
Give the user great feedback when no results are found.
Make sure you are using different colors for visited and unvisited links.
When search results are documents (pdf’s etc) give introductory text (e.g., the abstract) to the document.