Search Pagination Design Pattern

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February 13, 2006 at 5:39 am by Bill Scott | In Design |

Problem Summary

The user needs to view a set of search results ranked by relevance that is too large to easily display within a single page.

Search pagination focuses on controlling paging through search results that are usually sorted by relevance. With Item Pagination, the user may want to go through any number of pages to find information, Search Pagination results are generally most useful on the first page or so.

Pagination is the standard way of handling larger data sets. An alternate approach is using an endless or on-demand scrolling technique. In a future release of the pattern library we will document the Endless Scrolling pattern (which is currently used in the new Yahoo! Mail Beta.)

The pattern can be found at: Search Pagination Pattern.

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7 Comments »

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I also wrote a javascript pagination for IE6 at http://dqtjspaging.sf.net
I hope there’re some ways to make contribute to Yahoo Open Source UI Library. Your patterns are great!

Comment by Do Quang Tu — February 14, 2006 #
Nice, but you need two additional guidelines:

a) Label the control.

b) Make the arrow(s) clickable.

Both of these guidelines are followed in the implementation on Yahoo! Search, but I think they deserve to be made explicit in the documentation.

Comment by Jakob Nielsen — February 14, 2006 #
Jakob,

Good catch. Will update this on the next push of the site.

An interesting side effect of publishing the libraries is that we will also expose places on Yahoo! that we are not consistent with our patterns :-) But that is a good thing.

Thanks!

Comment by Bill Scott — February 14, 2006 #
What internationalization (i18n) issues do you plan to consider in your patterns? This pattern might need to allow for a left-to-right (LTR) layout when the host system is localized for a LTR language.

Comment by Kevin Yank — February 14, 2006 #
As I was using flickr.com recently, I noticed how they have really improved the “hit target” problem that happens with a lot of the implementations of this pattern. The issue is that with small links, it’s often hard to hit the link (since it is often 1 character wide.) I wrote a short on how I think it improves on this pattern.

Comment by Greg Bernhardt — March 13, 2006 #
A further refinement: I think the title is misleading. ‘Results Page’ implies there’s only one page. ‘Results pages’ would be better (I don’t like Title Case capitalisation either). Even if it doesn’t change when there’s only one page of results, you’d be right more of the time. (Or why not just ‘Results’? Not specific enough?)

Comment by Beck Laxton — May 22, 2008 #
Why have a design pattern for paginating items and then have another one for paginating results? Are results not items?

Comment by jason — June 16, 2008 #

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