Is there an industry perspective on an approach?
Topic on Extension talk:CirrusSearch/Query Construction/Use cases
I haven't done any serious research and I'm having hard times finding example websites (other than major search engines) that provide search where results can have mixed content types.
Major search engines seem to all have adopted the tabbed search results approach to allow people dig into a particular category of results. Some have richer diversity in the main list of search results with different sections.
As for other search interfaces I've dug into (news sites, product search, library search) I could not find something that shares similar usecases (mixing different content types).
This certainly deserves further research but my impression is that UX should be adapted when different content types have to be part of a search system, I never encountered an search UI that mixes for example images and text results in the same list, it's either different sections or different tabs.
Google seems to use combined approach:
- It inserts sections of different-type content into search links list, such as images, videos, links to businesses, questions, etc. Some go on the bottom, some in the middle.
- It also has tabs like Shopping, News or Images
- It also has sidebars with some data and some related links
However, I am not sure whether what Google (as an example) does is what we want - Google has some concerns (like selling ads and search placements) that we do not, and frankly all that stuff on one search page feels a bit overwhelming and overwrought.
I know Adam is asking more about the backend, but one simplifying component to your and @DCausse (WMF)'s point, is that I don't think we should bother with multiple content types in basic search. I suspect most folks are probably searching for one content type at a time. I have never understood why we show pages, galleries, categories and files all together on commons, when the vast majority of people are primarily looking for a specific medium. It is hard for me to imagine the use case where someone says "I want a picture of a cat....or an audio of it...or a pdf or a category page. Some folks in the community might be disappointed that their curated galleries don't show up by default, and I could be wrong: I think an industry survey or some user testing could verify if users actually want mixed results. @RIsler (WMF) in case he has another interpretation.
How about for the search dispatching and routing part that's behind the UX, any insight on that?
Sorry for being late here and thanks a lot for your interest in this topic. The best I could do is guesstimate but would love someone with better expertise to weigh in. I suppose that detecting query intent plays an important role in choosing the layout of the search result page. Major search engines are probably OK to dispatch the query to many services (websearch, image/video search, question answering, location search, shopping...) including a service that is dedicated to selecting the best layout for this particular search.