Jared Spool: User Interface Engineering
Jared Spool: User Interface Engineering -- "The Customer Sieve" Article: "Users can easily search uniquely identified content because they know what they are looking for." Wherein Jared concludes that search engines are useful only for known item searching (when you know what you're looking for).
I don't agree with his conclusion (don't use search when your users don't look for known items) though. Instead, look at search as an interface. If you have a known item, the results page should just show the items. If people are looking for categories and such (unknown items), the search results page should use controlled vocabularies and present itself as a browsing environment (which supports unknown item searching) instead of a list of items.
# Feb 11, 2003