CodePlex's Search Now Officially Sucks :(

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

<rant>

Aren't we all supposed to live by this mantra? So CodePlex looked ok and the search worked just fine... but apparently the owners decided it was broken. The new look & feel is ok... although it feels like everything was just thrown all over the page and organized with a few lines. Yuck.

But the search? Man, this "new" search is horrible. As Peter wrote about in his AJAX: Enough Already! post, looks like they decided to AJAXify it for AJAXian sake. All searches on CodePlex now use AJAX. AJAX is supposed to provide a cleaner and better user experience, but the way they did it on CodePlex is, agreeing fully with Peter, "that's a lot more annoying and disruptive to the user experience than a slight flicker of a quick postback".

See for yourself. When you execute a search, they put a gray box over the whole browser with a little green message stating "Updating..."... nice... no animation or anything. Same deal when you jump from one page to the next. The only way you know search is working is if you have seen or heard about this before (thankfully I saw Peter's post)... even the IE false-sense-of-progress bar in the status bar at the bottom of IE doesn't even move... nice.

I just went over and searched for "sharepoint" and I sat staring at this gray box for 5 seconds... nice... if I didn't know better, I would have closed by browser tried again, then jumped over to Firefox and tried the same thing. So I figure "ok, they got some caching going I bet... next search will be faster." Nope... 4-6 seconds every single time I search for SharePoint.

Man, such a bad experience now... and that's so sad. It isn't like this is some super complex search or anything... it isn't like the old one was broken. Even the big, complex searches you run out there use postbacks with a little "working" page (ever searched for a flight on Expedia or Delta?) and it works just fine. Why... why oh why CodePlex guys did you have to do this? Arg :(

</rant>

posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:42 AM

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# re: CodePlex's Search Now Officially Sucks :( 10/10/2007 10:53 AM Peter Bromberg

Yup. Hit the nail right between the eyes, Andrew.

# re: CodePlex's Search Now Officially Sucks :( 10/10/2007 4:27 PM Sam H

You got that right...

It works "normally" if you have javascript disabled. :)

# re: CodePlex's Search Now Officially Sucks :( 10/10/2007 4:35 PM AC [MVP MOSS]

Sam-
We need a site specific JavaScript disabling capability! :)

# re: CodePlex's Search Now Officially Sucks :( 10/10/2007 7:59 PM Kanwal

If you are looking to disable JS on specific sites..firefox users check out

http://ilias.ca/archive/mozilla/browserfaq/noJS

# re: CodePlex's Search Now Officially Sucks :( 10/11/2007 12:20 AM The Mossman

As the world moves towards a more responsive internet (known in some circles as RIA (not pronounced as reeah)) true user interface design becomes more important. With rich internet apps becoming easier to make, more people who have no business designing human interfaces will be making them.

# re: CodePlex's Search Now Officially Sucks :( 10/11/2007 10:40 AM Kevin

We actually talked about implementing something quite similar on one of our sites here and there were very few situations we could come up with that it actually served the end user better than other methods. We're still split on whether this kind of window or a pop up is better for alert/modal windows. The advantage we liked over a pop up was that it avoids the various issues with tabbed browsers, people with tons of windows open already, popup blockers, etc. It just keeps it in the current site/application window. Biggest downside currently is accessiblity.

The codeplex implementation is particularly funny because the search results still load as a traditional postback page refresh.

# re: CodePlex's Search Now Officially Sucks :( 10/11/2007 5:16 PM Sam H

there's a firefox extension called noscript I use that does site whitelisting/blacklisting (even just for the session if you like).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

might be the same one that guy Kanwal plugged

There's another one I use for cookies called CookieSafe too.

hopefully I'll see you for dinner when you guys are in town. looks like Jason is working through the details. :)

# re: CodePlex's Search Now Officially Sucks :( 10/13/2007 12:44 AM CStick

Can that really be classified as AJAX. It looks like they are just changing the visual appearance of the document on submit and not actually doing anything asynchronous. The page it is still posting.

I've seen this used to prevent people from clicking buttons over and over during expected long processes. Well, the site is pretty slow, relatively speaking.

# re: CodePlex's Search Now Officially Sucks :( 10/29/2007 11:45 AM Becky Isserman

It just seems like most search engines get worse over time as more data is added and there isn't much we can do...Also, noscript is great if you remember you have it installed, because I notice a lot when my boyfriend is using it when he is trying to authenticate a form (i.e. amazon.com login) he forgets that it's on. He then spends 30 minutes trying to figure out why exactly he can't login. just remember to turn it off when you don't need it and you should be fine if you use it.

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