Comfort food gets all the press, but I also indulge in comfort reading (or listening, in the case of audio books). Which is how I came to be searching for Cold Comfort Farm, a delightful book by Stella Gibson that fills the role of mac-n-cheese for the brain nicely. Sadly, I was thwarted in my attempts–but I did wind up with a chuckle and a nice screen cap.
Bad Search is notorious enough that it was listed as #5 in Jakob Niesen’s “top ten mistakes” in 2005 (a decade into the Web) and then bumped up to #1 when when he revisited the list in 2011! I know that search configuration is a real headache for a lot of organizations–they buy a product having been assured that it will work for them “out of the box” and then discover that really getting effective results requires customization they haven’t budgeted for. Nevertheless, its disheartening that search results are still so bad.
That said, this was a case where lousy search results made me laugh out loud before I put on my GUI Bloopers hat and started deconstructing the page. The picture would be self explanatory had they followed the best practice of showing the search query on the results page, but we can’t have everything…