3 ms·

The thing is, Wikipedia's search is pretty straightforward: type keyword, arrive on article page. Anything you'd add to that would detract from the search expe

• pjscott 15y ago
  The problem is when your search doesn't bring you immediately to the right article -- if it's not a simple search term like "Bermuda Triangle" -- and you end up looking at a page of results like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=wireless+router+firmware http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=wireless+router+f... Those are actually pretty good results, but their presentation is lacking. The snippets of article text are too short to give a proper idea of what the article is about and how it relates to the query terms. The formatting is straightforward but not particularly good or bad. The article metadata in green is nigh-useless to the vast majority of people; do you want text like "11 KB (1,170 words) - 12:19, 10 July 2011" cluttering up each search result? The section headings, like "Content Pages" and "Multimedia" are simple links, and it's not visually obvious under what circumstances you might want to click them, or what will happen if you do. That's just off the top of my head, and I'm not a designer; just someone who cares about usability. I imagine a good designer could make something quite a lot nicer than Wikipedia's default search pages.