Nobody Uses Advanced Search

Tim Bray’s second installment on search…

“Every search engine has an “advanced search“ screen, and nobody (quantitatively, less than 0.5% of users) ever goes there. This drove us nuts back at Open Text, because our engine was very structurally savvy and could do compound/boolean queries that look like what today weÂ’d call XPath. But nobody used it.”

I used it quite a bit. In fact, the advanced search pare was what I would bookmark on most search engines. However, indeed, I was certainly in the minority.