Proud
Posted by Neil Crosby on August 21, 2007 08:00 PM
So, yesterday something I’ve been working on for quite a while went live. For the past couple of months I’ve been working on the front-end of the new search experience for Yahoo! Eurosport, and finally yesterday it went live.
So, what is this “new search experience” then? Basically, it’s an assistance layer on top of a standard Sports search that works out the sort of thing you’re searching for within the field of sport, and rearranges your results page accordingly. So, out with your father’s ten results to a page and in with Something New.
If, for example, you searched for “David Beckham” you’d end up with a page containing some Sports page results, some images and some videos. Conversely, if you searched for “Millennium Stadium” then you’d end up with a map replacing the videos, and if you searched for something non-sports related like “Google” you’d end up with a simple list of web results. Being able to alter the layout of the results page gives us a lot of scope to do some groovy stuff depending on what the user searches for and what modules are available.
As well as the ability to reorganise the page on a whim, the new Eurosport search results page also has a couple of nifty little JavaScript enhancements. The first of these is the infinite carousel that each of the main search modules has. Whenever you click one of the next or previous buttons on a module you’ll get to see the next bunch of results on the page, with more being loaded in in the background via a little bit of AJAX whenever there aren’t enough left cached. Personally, I love this feature - especially on the images module. The other pretty groovy bit of JavaScript is the open/close module functionality that lets you close a module for good if you decide that you don’t want to see those type of results any more. So, if images aren’t your thing, simply close the section and save some page weight on subsequent searches.
I’m really glad that this SERP has made it out onto Eurosport. It’s something I’ve been tackling for a while, and it’s good to see it out there.
For those of you who are interested, the title of this post came about via Ross Boozineges, who asked me to write a post about something I was proud of. So, there we go.