It turns out there is a lot of great data out there presented poorly. Once you wrap your head around Viewzi’s notion of presenting data in interesting, engaging ways suitable to the data, it becomes almost compulsive. I’m constantly thinking about ways to present data meaningfully. But to be a View, it has to be search results. We are not merely making data look great, be more functional, etc. We are doing that for search results. Thats a lot harder than simply making a great looking static web page. Search results can be messy, and sometimes thwart attempts at prettying them up.
Here’s one small example. We wanted a View that showed search results for news in a clean, newspaper-like way. A main article is highlighted with a picture, and then other results fall into columns beneath it. So far so good. But many articles don’t have a picture. How do you set up a template when the results are unpredictable? Dumbing the View down to the least common denominator isn’t the answer, because the resulting View is so much less. Limiting the data sources to those with reliable pictures might be a way forward, but lowers the usefulness of the View’s results due to the limited sources.
Our solution? We get our news story results, and do a separate image search using the lead article’s title. So the stories come back based on the user’s search term, and the picture comes back using the associated story’s title. This simple solution is remarkably reliable. It lets us have the presentation we wanted without being stymied by our data sources. We have the right data presented in a compelling way.
Of course, all that is under the hood. Hopefully, the end result is simply great looking search results that help you find what you were looking for faster.
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