Have you ever been frustrated by a difficult search problem? Chances are you have. In the first post to the Bing Community Blog, Satya Nadella of Microsoft reported that more than 50% of time spent on searching is spent in sessions over half an hour long. (The statistic was based on an analysis of search usage data across all search engines using toolbar logs.)
Working on a difficult search problem requires issuing multiple queries with different combinations of search terms and browsing their result sets. This is a frustrating thing to do when using a traditional search engine such as Google. Traditional search engines let you dive deep into a result set, by clicking from one page of results to the next, but they don’t make it easy to go back and forth from one result set to another. In other words, they are designed for depth-first rather than breadth-first search.
Noflail Search, on the other hand, has a special feature that allows you to do a breadth-first search or, more precisely, a breadth-first traversal of the combined result sets of several queries. That sounds complicated, but Noflail Search makes it very easy. The special feature is a search history that remembers not only earlier queries but also your position in the result set of each query, so that, when you go back to an earlier query, you can resume browsing its result set where you left off. That makes it possible to use a breadth-first strategy for browsing the result sets of several queries. You can, for example, look at the first page of each result set, then the second page of each set, then the third page, and so on.
Noflail Search even remembers your scrolling position within each page of results. And it remembers all this even if you close your browser and turn off the machine. When you exit Noflail Search, the positions within the result sets you were browsing are saved to Flex local storage.
To use this feature, make sure that the engine in the Engine box is Bing (or Bing Feeds, which searches blog posts only) and that Noflail Search is in Advanced Mode. (Click on the blue button to go to Advanced Mode if necessary.) In advanced mode there are four vertical panels, and the leftmost panel shows the search history:
Four-panel display with search history in Advanced Mode
When you issue a query, the first page of results is shown in the Results panel, and an entry for the query is placed at the top of the search history. The entry has a checkmark, which causes it to go away when you issue the next query. If you think you’ll want to go back to the query, remove the checkmark and the query will remain in the history until you reinstate the checkmark and click the Delete button or issue a new query. The screenshot below, for example, shows a portion of the display after you have issued the query “diabetes stem cell” and removed the checkmark from the search history entry for the query. The results of the query can be seen in the Results panel:
Retaining a query in the search history
Continuing with the example, suppose you go through two-and-a-half pages of results and then decide to try another query. You may be looking for new therapies to cure diabetes, and issue the query “diabetes islet cell”. Now there are two queries in the Search History panel:
Browsing the result sets of two queries
After looking at, say, four pages of the result set of the second query, you may want to dig deeper into the result set of the first query. To go back to the first result set all you need to do is click on the first query. You are then taken immediately to the third page of the first result set, shown at the exact scrolling position that you had reached when you issued the second query.
Breadth-first search using Google
If you are addicted to Google you may be thinking: can I do this in Google? Well, you are in luck. You actually can do breadth-first search with Google, using browser tabs. Open two tabs, run the query “diabetes stem cell” on Google in one of the tabs, and “diabetes islet cell” in the other. You can then jump from one result set to the other by switching from one tab to the other. And the tabs are labeled by the queries:
Breadth-first search with Google
However, opening a tab, visiting Google and typing a query takes longer than modifying the query in the query box of Noflail Search and clicking the Search button. And if your queries are long or you have many tabs open, the queries fill not fit in the tab labels.
Search history in Bing
Noflail Search is not the only search engine that features a navigational search history. Microsoft introduced a search history when it launched Bing, and Ask and other search engines have followed suit. (The search history in Noflail Search predated Bing’s by several months.) The screenshot below shows the same two diabetes queries in the Bing search history:
Search history in Bing
Clicking on a search history entry in Bing, however, causes the query to be run from scratch as if the user had issued it again from the query box. The browsing position within the result set of the query is lost.
So next time you have a difficult search problem, give Noflail Search a try.
