Search applications that are focused on a single format can also open our eyes. Sometimes, it's just about fun. After an exhausting debate about sort order options, contemplating the chaotic piles of oSkope's visual search application can deliver valuable comic relief.
But a focus on format can also uncover more adaptable solutions. Simply searching bookmarks at Delicious, shown in Figure 5-16, reveals an elegant integration of autosuggest, filter by tag, and result visualization that could be profitably redeployed in many categories and contexts.
MrTaggy, an experiment in web search and exploration, also relies on social tags rather than full-text content to drive its ranking algorithms. Its novel user interface supports relevance feedback by inviting people to vote up or down on tags and individual results.
Shopping for just the right colors of paint offers a very different challenge in which keywords are only a small piece of the puzzle. Olympic has developed a Paint a Photo application that not only provides myriad ways to search and browse colors, but also lets users drag and drop to see how their selections might match.
In clothing, Modista makes it easy to search by color and shape (Figure 5-19). Users simply click on an item they like in order to find more items like it. It's a fast, fluid iterative and interactive experience. Modista actually manages to make shopping and searching fun.
Over in the world of social networking, LinkedIn leverages the structured data of people's profiles to enable query refinement (Figure 5-20). Since these advanced search options are presented alongside results, it's easier for users to calibrate their narrowing query for just the right level of precision.
Working on a format-specific search application can present fascinating challenges. Surprisingly, the constraint of a single content type affords new freedoms. We need not worry about entire classes of content and query types. And when working solely with photographs, for example, there are all sorts of specialized search and interaction models to explore. Focus begets freedom begets discovery, which is why single-format search is fertile ground for innovation. We can all learn a lot by surveying these applications.
