Innovations in Search Results Pages

I asked tonight’s Recent Innovations in Search and Other Ways of Finding Information Panel (Peter Norvig, Google; Mark Fletcher, Ask Jeeves; Udi Manber, A9; Ken Norton, Yahoo!; Jakob Nielsen, NN Group) about the ubiquity of the search results list, what makes it the right interface solve for displaying search results, and why experiments in search result visualizations have met with little success.

• Peter Norvig explained that clustering technology is not yet advanced enough to provide meaningful data visualizations to users.
  


• Ken Norton pointed out that any search result needs to be really fast and what’s faster to send down the pipe than a text list?
  


• Udi Manber said visualizations of search data might become increasingly important for niche audiences. He also expressed concern that we may be standardizing an imperfect solution (with the results list) and used the metric system as a metaphor. The metric system is a better measurement solution than the English system, but we are so tied to the original way we did things (the English system in the US) that changing now is exceptionally hard.
  


• Jakob Nielsen leveraged user observations to argue that a prioritized list is basically a simple and usable interface solution: most users simply click on the first link (assuming it is the most relevant) and titles of search results are easy to scan quickly.
  

(Via Functioning Form)