>A good middle ground that I've seen across programs, apps and OS-level menus is to add a search box that "skips" the hierarchy navigation I use this in the iO

>A good middle ground that I've seen across programs, apps and OS-level menus is to add a search box that "skips" the hierarchy navigation I use this in the iOS Settings all the time. It truly is a great and important UI element. Web sites could benefit from adopting this as well. With the rise of Google, it seemed like everybody just kind of gave up on search. "They'll just Google it anyway." But for a lot of Web sites, having a decent and working search tool is really important. I remember a lot of articles talking about how to handle search on your Web site, with lots of tools and libraries and whatnot, and it just kind of dried up. There's still work happening on Big Time search technologies (Lucene, et. al.), but other than built-in things for platforms like Wordpress, it's kind of stale and quiet.