However, tag clouds are now being used in a rather elegant way by a couple of search engines. Collarity and Quintura use a small cloud of terms to present possibilities for topic refinement. A search for "Las Vegas" on Collarity yields a dozen suggested refinements ranging from caesars to guide. Quintura offers a dynamic tag cloud, with terms flying in and out as the user selects or deletes refinements.
Offering suggestions after the first query is nothing new, of course, but the tag cloud seems well placed here. The user can see at a glance the relative popularity of the suggestions, and a cloud feels more inviting than an ordinary list. Given that users have been slow to adopt query refinement mechanisms, this may be a small but meaningful improvement in search UI.
Search UI
24-July-2008
Tag Clouds
When tag clouds first appeared a few years ago, I wasn't too impressed. While I could see some potential in the ability to convey additional information through font size, most of the lists I saw were quite long. Realistically, it was difficult to imagine the user scanning for anything but the two or three most popular (i.e. largest) items. That rendered the other dozen or two items fairly useless.
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