Search is the new Navigation

Note: Change to Thursday night. 7pm, Feb 28th.

Menus as a means to finding content are fundamentally flawed in two ways:

1. They is a one to one relationship with content such that the number of menu items is directly tied to number of nodes. This is not scalable as content grows.

2. Creating navigation from a system that basically only allows for one mental path way to any one item is limited. This is not scalable to multiple perspectives, types of audiences or more than one way to find something.

Enter Search and tagged based information architecture. Your users are already leveraging search whether that be yours or Google to find the content they want because your navigation is flawed. Don't fight it, just make search rock!

I will show you how faceted search and taxonomy should be automatic for all your large websites.

Why not just use Google search? Many do and that is better than nothing, except in the case of core Drupal search where nothing actually would be better. But why does Amazon not use Google search? Google can only provide keyword search and that is limited. Amazon knows the structure of their data far beyond what a Google bot (spider) can gleam from your pages. With this knowledge of the structure of the data we can produce awesome search. Awesome search is when you think your navigating using menu items but really your just searching.

I'll walk you through the problem and demonstrate how search and taxonomy can lead you to architecting large scalable sites.

image ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vehicle_drug_search_australia.jpg

LOCATION

We'll be meeting in Room 8, Curtiss Hall at Iowa State University Google Map. Please excuse the mess in the hallways as parts of the building are being remodeled.

As always, the first hour of the meeting is open discussion/question time. If you have a question, or would like to bounce ideas around with others, please come and share!

Please do sign up so we get a good count.

See you there!