Searching...: a blog about search and the sun search team

We've been listening... did we get it right?
We've definitely heard you -- search is important and you want it to work better. So here it is, the new beta search.  The top things that we've heard from you are:

• Make it easy to find what I want.
• I want more content included from all of the related Sun sites.
• Help! Why do you include so much content in the search results?
• I want to be able to slice and dice my results.
• Where and what is advanced search?
• How can I get a better sense of what content that is available?
  

Of course there's more and as you can even tell from the list above, not everyone agrees on what they want.  The message that we received loud and clear is that you just want to find what you are looking for, every time you search.   That's a tall order but we believe that we are heading in that direction with our newly revised search, now in beta and ready for you to test.

What you will see...now
We really focused on these key areas with this beta:

1. Improved clustering:  We're getting rid of the tabbed filtered navigation to a more intuitive left nav system -- complete with a breakdown of results by area.
2. Improved user controls:   We're integrating the advanced search features directly into the interface and giving you choices on what to include and exclude in the results.
3. Improved integration of community content:  Couldn't find the community content you are looking for on our live search?  We don't always make it easy but we believe that this is a big step in the right direction towards that goal.

...and in the future
This is the first release of our new search platform prototype.  Is it perfect?  Absolutely not!  Is it everything we want it to be?  No, but it's a start.  We will be listening for your feedback and making changes based on what you tell us.  In addition, we will be continuing to focus on things like the improvement of suggested searches and the contextual quality of the results.

We're very excited about this and will be posting our findings here on a regular basis so check back here to see what else we've learned and where that's driving us.

Please, most importantly, we can't do this alone.   We need to hear your feedback.  So please, test out our new beta search and use the [+]  feedback button found on the lower right of each page to let us know what you think. Don't be afraid to give us your thoughts and suggestions.