lkcampbell
commented
3 years ago One of the ways we might be able to do this is to keep the search text in the search text box as the user flips from tab to tab. When the tab is clicked with text in the search box, the page automatically searches for that search text in Lists or Polls or Competitions or whatever tab the user just clicked. The default search would still be on games, but multiple result sets for the same search text could be navigated via tab clicking fairly quickly.
Even more ideal would be a numeric indicator displaying in each tab to indicate the number of results so you wouldn't have to click through a bunch of empty result sets before you find some matches. This would require us to get all of the search results at once and cache them so we know how many hits we got in each category. Would be a bit slower up front but navigation between tabs would be very fast after the initial search.
Note that the default page displayed as you click through tabs is search tips, so we would have to figure out another way to easily display the search tips to the user if that is what they need.
Searching in online search engines delivers results in multiple forms: images, music, videos, text. This is helpful because although form-specific searches are more specific, it's hard to know what specific form is best to use for a given search. IFDB's main search should return results for multiple specific forms e.g. games, tags, lists, polls...