Web Searching
Search technology is a great interest of mine, fast accurate searches make a massive different to any information retrieval task. How much relevance ranking, search faceting, related terms have made a massive different. It certainly appears to me that no matter how well designed a nativation hierarchy is, after a certain number a search engine is dramatically superior. I am unsure if there has been any research into maximum acceptable items contained within a navgation hierarchies is useful, but they quickly become unusable to anyone other than the original archiver when they span more than 3 tiers and although the number of items within each tier could vary I would suggest that anything larger than 1930 items would be extremely difficult to navigate without a search tool. This is assuming a 3 tier hierarchy with 8 items in the first and second tiers and 30 in the final tier. After reading an article on designing a mobile autosuggest it did remind me of one of t...