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When I’m not blogging here (which is, like, all the time), I’m totally blogging elsewhere! If you’re curious what I’ve been doing since I joined SmugMug, check out my new blog post over on the SmugMug Sorcery blog, in which I describe how we made SmugMug Search faster.
Seriously, check it out. There are pretty charts.
Unbeknownst to me, Bill Scott captured this brief screencast of a really old Search Assist bucket test I implemented, complete with ugly Yahoo!-only internal messaging. I had forgotten how rough the design was at that early stage. It’s so much more refined now.
How many things can you spot in the video that are different from the current iteration of Yahoo! Search?
Everyone and their dog seems to have written an example of how to use the Yahoo! Search BOSS API to build a simple search tool. I wanted to take that one step further and build something that would serve both as an example and as a usable service, and that could be extended and enhanced by other developers. Since my day job involves constant tradeoffs between making Yahoo! Search slower (by adding features) and making it faster (by optimizing those features), my primary goal here was to make something as fast as technically possible.
To do this, I wrote a very simple JavaScript module called Trogdor that uses dynamic script nodes to make cross-domain JSONP requests to the BOSS API as you type your query. Search results are returned and rendered almost instantly on each keystroke, and you can use the up and down arrow keys (or tab) and enter to quickly select the result you want—no mouse necessary.
Trogdor doesn’t require a JavaScript framework and works great in all modern browsers (and even some ancient, crappy browsers like IE6). The entire package (HTML, CSS and JS) weighs just a smidge under 2KB after minification and gzip, and it’s wonderfully fast.
Try it out for yourself at pieisgood.org/search and be sure to grab the heavily-commented source code on GitHub. If you’ve got ideas for features and improvements, fork the repo and go nuts (and be sure to let me know what you come up with). You’re also welcome to use Trogdor (modified or unmodified) in your own projects, although I do ask that you please use your own BOSS API key rather than the one included in the example.
Update, 11/26: Changed the name of the library from FastSearch to Trogdor, since dragons are awesome (and apparently there’s a Microsoft search product called FastSearch).
The original Inquisitor for Safari is one of my favorite browser plugins ever. Since switching from Safari to Firefox 3, I’ve missed it terribly. Now, thanks to Yahoo! and Inquisitor creator David Watanabe, Firefox and IE users can experience the joys of Inquisitor as well. Hooray!
I’ve written an article for the YUI Blog describing some of the techniques I used to optimize Yahoo! Search for the iPhone. You can use these techniques to improve the performance of any JavaScript-heavy iPhone web app, even if you don’t use YUI. Check it out!
In June, my boss came to me with a challenge: bring the full Yahoo! Search experience—including SearchMonkey, Search Assist, shortcuts, and other awesome Yahoo! Search features—to the iPhone with as few compromises as possible. He wanted an iPhone search experience that matched the desktop experience and took full advantage of Mobile Safari’s excellent featureset. And he wanted it in a month.
I grabbed Tom Chi and Jeremy Hubert from Search UED and we hashed out a plan over lunch. We used Jeremy’s existing iPhone Search prototype as inspiration. Tom had to fly to Paris to judge the Imagine Cup 2008 interface design competition, but in his spare time he churned out interface mockups and perfected the design while watching “young ladies in debutante dresses drinking and getting on a boat” on the River Seine. Meanwhile, I wrote the code.
Two weeks later, we quietly launched Yahoo! Search for iPhone. Here are just a few of the awesome features you can now enjoy on your iPhone:
Try it out and let us know what you think. And if you don’t have an iPhone handy, head over to Flickr to see some sexy screenshots of the iPhone SRP.
Next Thursday, May 15th, Yahoo! Search will host a developer launch party for SearchMonkey, our awesome new open developer platform. The festivities will take place from 5:30 to 8:30pm at Yahoo! Headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.
If you’re a developer and you’d like to learn more about SearchMonkey, meet the folks behind it (including yours truly), see live demos, eat free food, and drink free beer, register for the event at upcoming.org and send an email containing your full name and the name of your company (if any) to searchmonkeyevent@yahoo-inc.com.
Space is limited and the friendly security guards at the front gate won’t let you in if you’re not on the list, so be sure to RSVP soon.
One of the awesome things about getting to work on Yahoo! Search Assist is that I got to toss a few extra little features in there just for myself. I haven’t seen these mentioned in the press or blog coverage, possibly because nobody’s noticed them yet.
On search.yahoo.com, the cursor is automatically placed in the search box when the page is loaded, but on the search result page, we don’t automatically give focus to the search box because that would prevent you from scrolling using the keyboard.
So, what if you want to edit your query without moving your hand all the way from the keyboard to the mouse to click on the search box? Well, now it’s easy: after the page loads, just press tab. Voila, cursor in search box, ready to edit, no mouse necessary.
By default, Search Assist isn’t displayed unless you appear to be having difficulty deciding what to search for. It does this by analyzing your typing speed and noticing when you pause longer than usual. Sometimes, though, you want to see suggestions right away without waiting. You can use the mouse to click on the little arrow beneath the search box, but that requires more pesky hand movement. Luckily, there’s another option.
When the cursor is in the search box, you can simply press the down arrow on your keyboard to expand the tray. If you decide you don’t want the tray after all, hit the escape key to close it again. As has been mentioned elsewhere, you can also use the arrow keys to select suggestions and concepts.
If you’re a mouse person and aren’t fond of having to click the tiny arrows to scroll the lists of suggestions and concepts, just move your cursor over the list you want to scroll and use the mouse wheel. When the cursor isn’t over a suggestion list, the mouse wheel causes the entire page to scroll, but when the cursor is over a list, the mouse wheel only scrolls that list.
I can’t take credit for this one, but it’s one of my favorite new features nonetheless: Yahoo! Search goes up to 11. Google only goes to 10. You do the math.
I'm not sure when it happened, but it looks like Yahoo! oneSearch has been updated with a beautiful new iPhone-friendly interface. You'll see it if you visit oneSearch on an iPhone (and only on an iPhone).
Unfortunately I have no way to take screenshots and I don't have a camera with me at the moment to take photos of it running on my iPhone, but it's really very nice. The page automatically scrolls down to hide the Safari toolbar on load, and the color scheme, icons, and widgets all match the iPhone UI styles much better than the standard oneSearch design. I like!
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