Andrew Cox

Andrew Cox

Andrew started at Vivisimo in December of 2004, making him a grizzled veteran in the world of search. He is the lead for Clusty and the Velocity User Experience team. His focus is on creating enterprise applications that offer good, clean, semantic HTML within an extensible framework that allows easy customization. He thinks there are few web application problems that can't be solved through creative use of CSS. He believes in "opinionated software" and is trying to prove that enterprise software doesn't have to suck.

Down With Lists! Different Ways to Present Search Results

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

In the early days of the Automobile Age, Henry Ford famously quipped, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” In today’s Information Age, that’s like saying anyone looking for information can have any results as long as they are ranked in a simple list. Hogwash!

Nothing against lists, but as far as information representation goes, lists are just the beginning of what’s possible for presenting information in response to a query, whether it be explicit (e.g. in response to a search query) or implicit (e.g. dynamically loaded content). Depending on the type of information being presented, lists may or may not be the most clear and effective way to present the answers you are seeking.