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Reasons to replace advanced search with filters
- layer8 3y agoThey don’t really explain how filters differ from advanced search in their mind, other than apparently assuming that advanced search must be on a separate page. IMO it’s a continuum.
- PaulHoule 3y agoWhere I work we have advanced search and filters.
- Exuma 3y agoI would suspect advanced search boils down to advancifying your search term with specific properties about that term, or even the term itself with specifying logic operators. A filter would be not targeting a specific term, and would take no search terms, but would allow them to find the specific item they're wanting. Intuitively, filters seem far superior to advanced search, as long as your search is good for one off items. I haven't ever really thought about this explicitly but now that I do, I always reach for: 1. very solid search for single items 2. very good filters
- masklinn 3y agoThe only thing I can infer is that filters are contextually pre filtered, from #2: > [with] Advanced search […] every possible option is displayed even if they don’t have results. Which dovetails into #3: it’s relatively easy to create queries with no results.
- snowwrestler 3y agoThe approach they are arguing against has a “single box” keyword search that returns results in a clean set of results. The only way to refine results is to change the text in the keyword box. And then there is a little link to “advanced search” which is a separate page that offers filters in addition to the keyword box, before returning results. In both cases you have to re-run the search after making any changes to keywords or filters. Basically: the site has two separate search experiences: simple keyword, and keyword + filters, connected by a little dinky text link. What they are arguing for is a single search experience that starts with a single text box, but then exposes filter options as part of the results UI. You don’t have to hit the “search” button again, instead you “apply filters.” This is an example of “progressive disclosure,” where more powerful features of the software are revealed to the user as their try to do more complex tasks. Honestly, I think this article is at least 5 years too late, though. The value of filters in the results page is so obvious that even Google has adopted it. While I’m sure there are still some “advanced search” pages hanging around out there on the web, no one builds site search that way anymore. They all provide filters now.
- adambsilver 3y agoYou have explained it exactly right ha. Thank you. I also agree that my article is way too late and I did actually want to write about it 5 years ago. I’m a little slow :D In terms of Google, they still have a separate advanced search.
- adambsilver 3y agoYeah, the difference is the user has to understand "advanced search" and go to a separate out of context page to use the filters. Some people think of advanced search as what they type into a box. Fair enough, naming things is hard. I’m not sure how it’s a continuum - could you elaborate?
- donaldbough 3y agoNot helpful. I was hoping to hear more on alternatives. I've also never seen advance filters that show on a separate page.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- talkingtab 3y agoFor those like me who will be initially perplexed: Context filters take the results of a search and allow you to filter them by things like "five stars" or labels. There is much discussion about why advanced search is bad, but the case for filters is a one liner - filters solve all the problems. And the "how to use filters" part is the last drawing in the article. Once I got that it is an interesting thought, but I'm left trying to understand if there are downsides to filters?
- chiefalchemist 3y agoFor the sake of discussion, downsides: A) Added overhead to the backend B) UX - if you some filters but not the one(s) I want or need, then I'll get frustrated. No filters at all won't set me up for that. For example, eBay's filters are good for some types of products but not others. C) A and B combined. I've noticed that some filtering UX - Home Depot, I believe is an example - will update the count of the # of products matching your filters. Check a box...wait. Check another box...wait. Fat finger the wrong box...wait...uncheck...wait. I'm not saying these are reasons to not use filters, only pointing out some friction.
- masklinn 3y agoFilters are also slow as fuck because they almost always need to apply before you can go on. So you are on a results page, you want 4-5 starts with attributes x and y, that’s not just 4 clicks that’s 4 clicks and waiting for the entire thing to reload every time before you can continue. An other issue more intrinsic to filters is their inconsistency: because only applicable filters are shown entire categories can be missing and you need to hunt through every time.
- plaidfuji 3y agoI recently spent a few months buying a new sectional sofa. Boy is the interface for that process terrible. The experience went something like this: 1. Pick the overall style 2. Find vendors that make that style 3. Physically drive to far-away stores to get a sense for what our “comfort” KPIs are in terms of seat depth/height, back height, cushion fill, etc. 4. Go back online, manually compile a table of the above parameters across vendors, mainly pulling from PDF brochures with incomplete or incompatible information. Down filter to a few main candidates that satisfy major comfort and aesthetic objectives. 5. Take room measurements to understand constraints on configuration 6. With narrowed candidates, again manually compile available sectional piece options to determine the configuration that best fits our room. 7. Down to 2-3 options, go back to physical stores to test comfort (if they weren’t part of first round) and evaluate fabrics and finishes. 8. Final discussions, including considerations about price comp and lead times (varied from 2-6 months!). Finally make purchase. Maybe this is a little off-topic. But the point is this process was ultimately a couple of nested Sort/Filter operations, once the data was structured in a format relevant to our decision. That’s the biggest problem with online shopping - most of the data relevant to decisions is unstructured or unmeasurable. Once you get through that, then yes, filters are almost always the goal. I don’t really care about your fancy UI - I just want the information relevant to me in a spreadsheet so I can do a nested Sort.
- tshaddox 3y agoWhich sectionals were your top picks, and what did you end up buying?
- plaidfuji 3y agoHad to pull up the old spreadsheet… brands were Norwalk, Huntington House, Arhaus and Crate and Barrel. Went with C&B. Very happy with it so far
- purpleflame1257 3y agoWouldn't you have saved time by starting with point 5?
- ctrlGsysop 3y agoI agree with the author’s notion. In ecomm your goal is zero clicks to purchase. Search is used differently by your site’s differing cohorts let alone wildly different search demands depending on your product. Anyone doing advanced search is not at the bottom of your funnel yet; they’re still deciding between products let alone ready to click buy on one. Search bar tech is really good these days and solves a lot as it tries to drag out inferencing with suggestions and autocomplete. See also: https://baymard.com/research/ecommerce-search https://baymard.com/research/ecommerce-search
- avremel 3y agoBaymard is the gold standard for ecomm UX.
- simonw 3y agoI like the term "faceted search", which I first experienced working with Solr. Faceted search is effectively what this person is calling "filters", but often comes with an amazing bonus feature: each filter shows a count of how many results will be returned if you click it. This turns them into a powerful way to summarize your data. My https://datasette.io https://datasette.io has faceted search as a core feature - demo here: https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plants/global-power-plants https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan... One challenge I've found with both filters and filters-with-counts is the best way to design them for mobile screens, since they can take up a lot of valuable real estate. It can be done though: e-commerce sites in particular often come up with neat UIs for tucking the filters away in an easily accessible tray - though that can hurt discoverability of the feature in the same way this author complains about the advanced search pattern.
- masklinn 3y agoAfaik faceted search just means the system provides filtering through predefined categories (taxonomies). In TFA both “advanced search” and “filters” are faceted.
- canadiantim 3y agoI’d argue the beauty of faceted search is that it doesn’t require predefined categories, which (eg if using something like datasette) helps to explore the data even if it’s a new dataset
- hermanradtke 3y agoLast time I used solr the facets were defined in the schema so Lucene could create and index on that field.
- psadri 3y agoThe facets need to be defined but their possible values are computed from the data and don’t need to be predefined. These are also recomputed based on existing filters.
- eviks 3y agoNone of these are good since they involve way too many clicks on tiny square/round buttons with a lot of scrolling and expanding/collapsing various filter categories, so users can't "easily find" what they need
- adambsilver 3y agoWhat do you suggest instead?
- eviks 3y agoChorded navigation where I can select the srars with S, and then select min four stars with 4. But this requires good hinting (also, filters should be invokable within any product, so while viewing a book you can select its genre and filter it out) And minor things like a list of 6 radio buttons for stars can be a single line of 5 stars
- engcoach 3y agoYou need both search and filtering. Search to find hits (with context) and filtering to narrow down what’s displayed.
- adambsilver 3y agoExactly, that was my intention with the article.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoCan you please give us "grep -v" or inverse search: allow us to enable filters which find everything that doesn't contain such a property. This is a horrible omission in so many search/filter interfaces.
- adrianmonk 3y agoAlso, give me the ability to find nulls. Call it "other" or "unknown" if that's more accessible to normal people. In an ideal world, every product listing would have all relevant fields populated (and with correct values). In the real world, practically all databases have errors. For example, my grocery store's soda category: https://www.heb.com/category/shop/beverages/soda/490015/490043 https://www.heb.com/category/shop/beverages/soda/490015/4900... There are 419 results. On the left, the Package filter has Bottle (168 results) and Can (139 results), which totals 307. All 419 products actually are bottles or cans, so 112 products just don't have the data. If you filter, they will be missing.
- Phelinofist 3y agoAccess Denied Error 16 www.heb.com 2023-08-27 20:42:09 UTC What happened? This request was blocked by our security service Incident ID: 1309001730138387928-244354802817772362
- emmanueloga_ 3y agoYes, yes and yes. When the filter for a given property is set to a value, but an specific item has a null for that property, the correct thing is to match the item (since it is unknown, it is wrong to assume the value doesn't match!). I would even prefer two result groups: matching filters and "maybe matching filters". But most faceted search engines just filter out items when properties may or may not match a property.
- ovao 3y agoGetting the UI for that right seems like the real trick. We have checkboxes and radio buttons that are well-understood to give us the thing(s) that are selected or checked, but we don’t have anti-checkboxes.
- johnnyworker 3y ago(this comment probably isn't that interesting to anyone here, but it's an expression of how this article was useful for me, take it as a thank you :) That's kinda what the sidebar is in my CMS is, which I settled on 11 years ago. I just skip the search part, or you could say I treat everything as a search (of either all nodes or the subnodes of the node currently viewed). Think wordpress tag clouds with taxonomies, and authors; If you click a tag, you'll all nodes with that tag, and the sidebar now shows only the tags and authors of nodes that have the currently tag. "Drilling down" would be too big a word here, because you can only have one tag and one author selected, but that's the basic idea. All author/tag is put into the URL parameters of relevant links, so you can e.g. use pagination or click an author and not lose the tag you initially selected. I was kinda proud of it, but the code is horrible so I'm working on the successor, and this article got me thinking: I already plan on having more complex filters with AND, OR and nesting ("show all nodes that have author A and either tag X or tag Y, but not both tags, with tag Z" etc), but I probably totally generalize this, instead of implementing it for the stuff where it "makes sense" (tags, authors) to me now. Because in some spots it might make sense to allow grouping nodes by title, or if they're a link, by the domain they point to, etc. images could be grouped by width, and it would be great to not have to care about that now, if I can just make it work with any metadata a node can have, be it "on" the node or in other tables that need to be joined, and make it configurable which properties are displayed and can be filtered for by default, plus a way for users to look at and filter by all the properties any of the nodes currently displayed have. Keep it simple, right?
- adambsilver 3y agoI found it interesting and I’m glad the article was useful for you.
- stees 3y agoOne of the best implementations for an advanced search I know is the price comparison platform geizhals. They allow you to quickly drill down to a subset of relevant products, the filters give you a quick overview of the options you have. Check out the desktop version, the mobile version doesn’t give the same feeling. https://geizhals.eu/?cat=cpuamdam4&mobile=0 https://geizhals.eu/?cat=cpuamdam4&mobile=0
- adambsilver 3y agoThanks for sharing, the problem with this is that it pushes the results down. That’s a real downside.
- unnouinceput 3y agoIt depends on the situation. I absolutely believe the article's author would choose advanced search over filters when the list is long and the load is slow. In that case is best to give the user an advanced search possibility first, and maybe filter after that. Think Amazon's style, do you really want to wait 2 minutes to get all video cards when entering that category and only after that to filter after 4090 ones?
- adambsilver 3y agoI wouldn’t no. I’d look to sort out the root cause (slow server perf) in this particular case. But obviously we’re talking in the abstract. Advanced search is bascially the same as in context filters without the downsides.
- RHSeeger 3y agoIt seems more like the writer is advocating "search configuration included with the results" vs "search configuration as a separate page"; which I agree with. That being said, I don't refer to "search configuration as a separate page" as "advanced search". Rather, advanced search to me is just search with more options (to filter, generally, but also sort, etc). As a general rule, automatically entering into search with EVERY available option visible tends to be a bad idea; leaving to analysis paralysis. Rather, I like the idea of starting off with the most common filters; and allowing the user to ask for more (advanced search, I guess?). If possible, filters should be faceted (with counts), as noted by simonw in another thread.
- adambsilver 3y agoYeah I can see your view on this. It’s the trouble with naming things.
- tootie 3y agoMy experience is more on the content side than the product side, but we have mostly just abandoned search as a feature. 99.9% of searchers just to go to google. Our on-site search gets nearly zero traction. That's partly self-fulfilling because we've deemphasized it as it dropped in use and is not buried behind nav. But still, I'd generally recommend you invest in SEO and just ignore search.
- adambsilver 3y agoYeah, I mean ideally you’re nav is so simple that you don’t need search beyond Google. But it’s not always possible. Take an ecommerce store where the user wants to drill down on particular facets. That needs search (and filter).
- tootie 3y agoNo one uses our nav either. Like I said, we produce content so we have >100,000 articles. Our nav lets your drill by broad topics, but really it's just window dressing. It's almost all google, social and direct traffic just looking for whatever is latest. You have to think about what use case search is solving. Usually, it's discovery. People discover through google first and foremost, social and peers secondary. Unless you're Amazon, nobody is using you as a primary source to discover facets of anything.
- chupchap 3y agoI don't think it's either or. There are people who type in specific things in the search bar and then there are those who prefer to use toggles to narrow down to the results and both the audiences need to be catered to.
- adambsilver 3y agoI’m sure like you say there can be times for the other. For example, if users are used to going to a separate advanced search. But in context filters basically is advanced search without the pitfalls of advanced search.
- dtunkelang 3y agoBTW, I highly recommend the Relevance Slack as a good space to discuss this and search-related topics generally. It's run by OpenSource Connections, but it's free and anyone can join, even folks who compete with them. It's the best community I have found for search developers. https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2021/07/06/building-the-search-community-with-relevance-slack/ https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2021/07/06/building-t...
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoOne thing about facets is it probably depends a lot on what kind of data you have - you have retail data you know very well what your facets are - shoes, men's wear, women's wear, accessories etc. etc. If you have a large number of historical documents that have been scanned in you probably think you know what your facets are but there are also likely to be one's that you miss, thus you want to do some sort of facet extraction to determine what you have and combine that with the facets you have defined. Obviously not every facet that is found will be ones you want, for example when I was at Thompson Reuters we did a facet extraction on all Danish laws and cases and one of the facets was Knife Killing, which was not useful to know.
- adambsilver 3y agoYep, totally, if you have 100 facets (filter categories) then you’d want to curate them and progressively reveal more as they become relevant. Tricky, but that is definitely one of the trade offs. Luckily for me, the most amount of facets I’ve had recently are under 10 (which is plenty).
- svilen_dobrev 3y agobeen there, done that. Extremely difficult to (cram) arrange filters on a small mobile screen, and select/pick what to show there and what not. And extremely prone/dependent to actual users' skills and (current) mood/attitude - how much they want to invest in the particular search. But yes, facets/filters (positive + negative) are the way to search anything properly. So.. needs both... simple text one for the lazy/quick skim, and the multi-dimensional other for the industrious..
- adambsilver 3y agoI have a whole chapter on this in my book. You’re that it’s tricky but luckily it’s doable. In short, you partially overlay the current list/results with the filters. Way quicker than going to a separate page (and all the other downsides I mentioned in the article)