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Ask HN: What's the best 'non-frustrating' search/directory UI/UX you've seen?
I'm trying to find some inspiration for a new search engine I'm working but have found most searchable directory ui's to be very frustrating to use.
I'd love to know what you guys have seen out there. What have been some of the best examples of this type of ui that you've seen?
- brudgers 10y agoA few examples of search UI?UX and an indication of their design shortcomings might provide context for answers and a starting point for discussion.
- TickleSteve 10y agoSublime text.... ctrl p, type fuzzy match, instant results.
- isxek 10y agoIf you means something that searches for files within any directory, I think the best so far I've used was Everything (https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/). Lightweight, fast, and really simple UI. I'm still looking for a Linux equivalent (I'm currently using a shell wrapper for `ag --depth 0 -g <pattern> <directory>`.)
- to3m 10y agoI've been happy with Everything, too. Everything is good because it searches by multiple substrings, so you can be precise about what you're looking for. (The much-loved fuzzy search, on the other hand, in my experience returns results that might as well be random, until you type so much of what you're looking for that you might as well have typed the whole thing.) For searching file content I quite like Agent Ransack aka File Locator: https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack - main thing I like about it is that it's very quick and easy to see the content results from a subset of the file search results.
- Lagged2Death 10y agoI use Everything as well, it's really useful, very focused. It may seem "lightweight" in a modern desktop machine, but I believe the way it works is: it keeps the index of your entire filesystem in RAM at all times. And it continuously monitors that filesystem to keep the index updated. It's kind of brute-force, really. I can think of some ways that could get out of hand and not seem so lightweight. Regardless, the gap between what Everything can do and what the built-in File Explorer search can do is an embarrassing canyon, and I can't believe MS hasn't even fixed the built-in search enough to make it function correctly let alone quickly at this late stage.
- lucb1e 10y ago> I'm still looking for a Linux equivalent You mean `locate`? Package name in Debian is mlocate. I don't know ag and it's not a package in Debian. That said, I agree that Everything is a must-have on Windows. I don't understand how Microsoft's own search engine is so incredibly crappy (and has been since, what, Windows 95?) while Everything is a 200KB binary that does it perfectly.
- yoo1I 10y ago> I don't know ag and it's not a package in Debian. You're in for a treat then: the package name is "silversearcher-ag". Next time you want to grep a directory of files: instead of grepping it, pause, remember this comment, install it and then do "ag <searchterm>" instead. It's quite a bit faster. Well, lots faster.
- softawre 10y agofaster still: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
- e12e 10y agoInteresting. This probably the first utility in Rust I'm aware of that looks like it might belong on a production system (other than "cargo" and other rather excellent rust tooling). Nice way to show off rusts regular expression engine too.
- luibelgo 10y agoGolang flavour https://github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher https://github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lucb1e 10y agoThanks! I installed it a and aliased grep to 'echo Try ag'.
- chevas 10y agoAnd today I discovered a tool that solves a frustrating problem in Windows, thanks!
- marmaduke 10y agoListary is another good one for this, and it chains search results with common actions. From any explorer window or desktop you can just start typing to find stuff.
- kodisha 10y agoUpvoted, can't wait to hear some great comments and examples, because I too find this to be one of the most frustrating areas in my daily routine.
- ivan_gammel 10y agoPinterest is good as a directory of almost everything that has a picture. A lot of people in UX is using it to collect inspirational UI screenshots, diagrams etc, so it's possible that you can find something there.
- mschoebel 10y agoHave you looked at https://uimovement.com/tag/search/ https://uimovement.com/tag/search/ and https://uimovement.com/tag/filter/ https://uimovement.com/tag/filter/
- gbog 10y agoNot sure if it counts as ui buy it is for me the only non frustrating way to search anything in my filesystem: grep and find in the terminal.
- digitalengineer 10y agoIf we're talking ux it's how people search as well. We've got LATCH for that. Location, alphabet, time, category and hierarchy. On the BBC website people might search for a 'detective' (category), but also might search for 'tomorrow, this week' (time) or 'most viewed' (hierarchy).
- retox 10y agoI've always found the search on iPlayer to be next to useless. Haven't got a specific search to demonstrate, stopped using it after I deleted flash. It's a real shame the BBC continue to use flash and recommend Adobe reader when they link to a PDF. I've emailed recommending some alternative but never heard anything back.
- cogs 10y agoWe built a SQL query tool for the filesystem (macOS) last year, and will be launching for Windows in the next two weeks. Finding files is pretty straight forward using the LIKE operator against text in the filename, path or file contents. And the set-based logic of SQL works very well for identifying sets of files to work with: we have an exec() command that lets you run commands on file paths returned in query results. License terms are free for personal use and $5/month commercial. http://etia.co.uk/ http://etia.co.uk/
- ComodoHacker 10y agoWere you inspired by Microsoft Log Parser?
- cogs 10y agoWe did look at Log Parser, and osquery, before starting to build Crab, but neither of them have an exec() command to run programs on query results - such as deleting them, unzipping them, or moving them. And Log Parser doesn't support joins either, which are useful to compare the contents of one directory or file with another.
- 0restes 10y agoI do consulting for UX for faceted search, and the top of my shortlist for ideas/inspiration is still http://devart.withgoogle.com/ http://devart.withgoogle.com/ But for a search engine, I'm interested in how UI that works much like this example would play out: https://material.uplabs.com/posts/google-search-design-concept https://material.uplabs.com/posts/google-search-design-conce...
- rocky1138 10y agogrep
- Godel_unicode 10y agoI am amazed that Google and grep are at the bottom of this thread. I guess they're not cool anymore, but they're two of the best examples of search UX there are.
- colejohnson66 10y agoAs powerful and fast[0] grep is, it's probably because Regular Expeesssions aren't exactly user friendly [0]: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-August/019310.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug...
- 6DM 10y agoI don't know about a system for all file types, but I've always really liked how wallbase did image search. That went down but this is supposed to be the upcoming replacement: https://alpha.wallhaven.cc/ https://alpha.wallhaven.cc/
- carsongross 10y agoI tend to add live searches in the most important tabular views of my apps, using something like this: http://intercoolerjs.org/examples/activesearch.html http://intercoolerjs.org/examples/activesearch.html Search speed, good fuzzy matching and good row/chip design are as important/more important than the basic search UI, IMO.
- NathanKP 10y agoI've also been working on a search engine website, and personally my approach for the search/directory UI has been to keep it as minimal as possible, like early Google. Not sure how inspiring it is, but here you go: https://changelogs.md/ https://changelogs.md/ The goal of this UI is to have the bare minimum of useful info easily accessible.
- Buetol 10y agoI've been collecting examples of search interfaces, maybe it can help you: https://sortandfilter.tumblr.com/ https://sortandfilter.tumblr.com/
- singularity2001 10y agogoogle ... before it became frustrating to be under total surveillance.
- colejohnson66 10y agoGoogle is amazing! However, to be fair, it'd be pretty hard to provide such amazing and accurate results without knowing a lot about you. Granted, I do wish they'd let you control more about what they know about you. I'm reminded of the (not surprisingly) defunct Google Desktop and how it would build an index of your file system and let you search it "fuzzily" like you can with Google Search.
- vram22 10y agoSome time back Google also had a product for sale to enterprises called the Google Search Appliance or something like that. IIRC they were pushing it as a packaged solution for on-prem search. Not sure what happened to it later. Edited to add: Searched Google for it (how meta). Found this: https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance#Retirement_and_Shutdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance#Retire... So it may still be available - until 2018.
- pquerna 10y agoI don't think its perfect, but I think Yelp's search UI does pretty well for a ton of choices, and integrates Geo-boxing in a way that most people can understand more easily than within 20 miles of a zip code Example: https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=tacos&start=0&l=g:-122.37739562988281,37.80839662111562,-122.47970581054688,37.726977588897356 https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=tacos&start=0&l=g:-122... They keep the most common filters quickly available, make it easier to dive into more, and their search result entry contains the neighborhood so i can quickly figure out where something is, a photo, part of a review, phone number and address.
- whitepoplar 10y agoMaybe it's not what you're looking for, but I've found McMaster-Carr's website to be highly functional in its UI/UX: http://www.mcmaster.com http://www.mcmaster.com
- JoshTriplett 10y agoNewegg has one of the most powerful product search/filter mechanisms I've seen. It's not the best UX (could use more performance and a better multi-select mechanism, and dividing the interface into three levels of simple/advanced/power search doesn't seem ideal), but in terms of functionality, it almost always has the features I want pulled out and selectable. Search for a monitor, and you'll get options for resolution, inputs, size, etc. In terms of raw performance, I'm impressed with the speed and presentation of https://instantdomainsearch.com/ https://instantdomainsearch.com/ . Instant live responsiveness improves usability significantly.
- spking 10y agoI'll second https://instantdomainsearch.com/ https://instantdomainsearch.com/. Despite lots of copycats and more "feature-rich" alternatives, I find myself using IDS by default because of its speed and simplicity.
- tehwalrus 10y agoThe very old iTunes search bar. I still miss it. Basically, because the list of songs was short-ish (in CS terms), it would fiter it based on the current search textbox what seemed like instantly. I would have a large list and filter it down each time the user types another letter: and concentrate on making that as fast as possible.
- perlgeek 10y agoI like Jira's JQL search functionality. (This is for rather structured data, which are issues in a project management system). It offers autocomplete for logical operators, search operators, field names and even for values (where there is a limited amount of data available to select). And it offers enough power for nearly all queries I could think of so far. (In contrast to SQL there are no subselects or explicit joins, but there are plugins that make subselects available).
- BrunoJo 10y agoHave a look at https://www.pexels.com/ https://www.pexels.com/. I think the UX is great to find photos.
- fsniper 10y agoWow, this site has beautiful photos. Absolutely fantastic.
- ChoHag 10y agomu
- collyw 10y agoGoogle.