Should Google emphasize faceted search more?

Daniel Tunkelang from Endeca has an interesting post this week about Google's lack of faceted search. Faceted search lets you drill down into a list of results to find the exact thing you are looking for. It's particularly effective on an ecommerce site, for instance where you could search for clothing > men's > pants > dress > black.

But Tunkelang wonders if it would be an effective method on the open web. He speculates that perhaps users are overwhelmed with choices already. If you take a quick look at Bing (as I did in this video), it has tons of features, but I wonder how many users are even aware these are there or even notice them. Most people are looking for a quick strike within the first couple of results.

That's the beauty of Google. It gives the people what they want, a way to get those quick results in an uncluttered interface. They enter a few key words and typically find what they are looking and get out. If that's the case, why should Google provide more than that?

Google has a faceted style search in the Lab called Google Squared, which provides a way to drill down through a list of subjects, but it's in the highly experimental stage at this point and provides mixed results at best. But do they really need faceted search? As Tunkelang says, no reason to fix something when nobody perceives it as broken. I couldn't agree more, but it can't hurt to plan ahead just in case.

For more information:
- see Tunkelang's blog post

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