Searching from the home page
Categorised under: Interface design
The Sydney Morning Herald has published a story discussing the value of having a search form on the home page of a large website.
The SMH has a nasty habit of expiring articles, so in case the link stops working, here’s one of the best bits:
Dr Hawking related the story of an Australian financial institution that invited Internet surfers to type a query word such as “investment” in the search- engine box. “You typed `investment’ into the query box and it said `Sorry, no results found’,” he says. “I think that’s really bad advertising.”
A recent CSIRO survey showed that about 84 per cent of university sites, 61 per cent of Federal Government agency sites, 36 per cent of IT company sites and only 20 per cent of sites for public companies provided a direct search engine link or form on their homepage.
(Side note: I live in Sydney, and I regularly read the SMH online. Pretty much every day, in fact. Yet, I somehow missed this article, and it took a reference in a US e-mail list for me to find it. The power of the internet in action…)
James Robertson is the Managing Director of