Seeking examples of website searchability you love

May 26, 2022 12:38 PM

I am about to start updating a website at work and I'm looking for some inspiration for sites that have nice filtering and searchability for bodies of stuff - catalogues, repositories, databases.

Basically the site is a database that folks use to look up summaries of research publications. This all started out as a messy spreadsheet and everything is text or hyperlinks.

I don't have any background in UX or design, so I'm just interested in learning a little more about what's out there that people actually find useful. Here are a couple of examples of sites where the search lets you very easily go from broad to specific across many different types of information (medium, location, culture, etc) allowing the user to easily see all the possible categories without it being totally overwhelming. I'm not even sure what you call these types of features.

Harvard Art Museum collection catalogue

PCORI Engagement Tool and Resource Repository

Do you have any examples of filtering or search that you use and really like?

posted by forkisbetter to Grab Bag (13 answers total)

I always find the search engine on Newspapers.com is very efficient. And on a site like that, the searchability is everything.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:01 PM on May 26, 2022

I use Newspapers.com a lot and I am surprised how well it works. I'm also a fan of old-but-good Open Library which has some facets that you can select when looking for things. The same folks, the Internet Archive, have their own search on their part of the site and the "advanced search" is a great example of how not to do things.
posted by jessamyn at 1:39 PM on May 26, 2022

It's definitely not perfect, but I use Thred UP and am impressed by the ability to filter what I assume is a large inventory by very specific parameters.
posted by jeszac at 1:45 PM on May 26, 2022

DigiKey and McMaster Carr come to mind (although the second one is mostly easy to use due to good ontology, rather than the specifics of the site design).
posted by wesleyac at 2:35 PM on May 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

The search and filtering functions at the Archive of Our Own are quite good.
posted by darchildre at 3:32 PM on May 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Australian libraries and archives (and more) are centrally searchable through Trove, which was an initiative of the National Library of Australia. It's incredibly powerful, and I use it every single day in my job—indeed its existence really makes my job possible.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:14 PM on May 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was going to point you to PCORI. It’s the best one I’ve found
posted by melodykramer at 5:15 PM on May 26, 2022

NYPL's digital collections site is likewise amazing. Very simple front end, but when you drill down to a specific item it's pretty amazing the level of information that is there and how well it's presented.
posted by jessamyn at 5:34 PM on May 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Try looking for a women's shirt on Macys.com. Not bad :)
posted by amtho at 7:55 PM on May 26, 2022

I much prefer it when results are presented in paginated sets, with an indication of total number of pages, rather than infinite scroll. I loathe infinite scroll, to the point that I rage-quit a website (and possibly avoid revisiting or shopping there in future) as soon as that scroll starts scrollin'.

Pagination makes it easier for those of us with completionist mindsets to pace our browsing and to find our place after a break or refreshing the page.

A particularly annoying website I once saw would not allow opening a result in a new tab and had infinite scroll. If you wanted to take a look at a specific entry, you'd have to click on that result, and when you were done looking at that page, you'd have to return to the overall search results but that would REDO THE ENTIRE SEARCH and dump you back at the beginning, before all the scrolling you had done...
posted by Sockin'inthefreeworld at 3:03 AM on May 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Discogs, the music website that features a database of information about audio recordings, has a quick and efficient search and filtering system.
posted by jeremias at 5:03 AM on May 27, 2022

Fire Mountain Gems is a website where you by beads and such so you can make necklaces etc. It has a phenomenal filtering selection. I have never been so impressed by an e-commerce shop, esp one that's independently owned.
posted by ellerhodes at 5:05 AM on May 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

I really enjoy using the “advanced search” on ravelry.com (the knitting and crocheting website). Filtering is easy and well organized and the results view presents a lot of relevant information in a compact way, even before you click through to any individual hit. And you can “star” the most promising hits and then view them as a group, which is nice.
posted by bluebird at 6:55 AM on May 27, 2022