Comments on: Wall Street Journal adds Selection-based Ajax Search

By: Agile Ajax

Agile Ajax — Tue, 30 May 2006 14:00:34 +0000

AJAX and the Zeigarnik Effect

My colleague Bob Moll over in the UXD blog writes about the Zeigarnick Effect and it’s implication for designing GUI’s. What is the Zeigarnick Effect? Bluma Zeigarnick was a Russian psychologist who in the 1920′s discovered that we remember unfinished

By: Karl G

Karl G — Fri, 05 May 2006 14:46:36 +0000

I wonder why they decided to do right click rather than double click? At least doubleclick wouldn’t conflict with the context menu and we don’t have a standard for double clicking text on the web. Firefox (by default I think) doesn’t allow the hiding of the context menu, so that’s annoying.

By: Marty

Marty — Fri, 05 May 2006 14:17:17 +0000

Yeah this was kind of neat when i first saw it, but it didnt seem quite ready for prime-time. For one, i couldn’t right-click the result links to ‘open in new window/tab’ — the results dissapear. But then i noticed that even though the results had dissapeared, there was still an option to “open new window” in the context menu. Wierd.

Also, select+rightClick is probably the right way to handle a phrase search, or multiple keywords, but even better for a single search term would be a simple doubleClick event, which leaves the word highlighted. No need for a right-click then.

It’s an interesting feature, but somehow i doubt it will be used very often.

By: Sam Corder

Sam Corder — Fri, 05 May 2006 13:44:21 +0000

That’s a feature that was almost cool. Like others said it isn’t very intuitive to find and once it comes up I didn’t see a way to close it in FireFox 1.5. Also most of the time the context menu pops up next to the search results but if the right click is too far to the left it goes over the search results. It’s also kind of strange that you can right click search on the search results themselves. The whole idea is good but it lacks polish.

By: jme giffo

jme giffo — Fri, 05 May 2006 13:21:37 +0000

i have done something similar for my own project (similar as in right click does something – not a search feature), sadly something like this is impossible to work with opera

the context menu in ie showing is just a joke

By: Dave Ashe

Dave Ashe — Fri, 05 May 2006 09:35:22 +0000

I think its a pretty lame usage of ajax, who is *EVER* going to use that feature of the site? probably only us, then it will be forgotten and will just add to the bloat factor of the site.

If they were that clever how about improving the navigation of the site, what is it with those dhtml menus?

By: Bart Claeys

Bart Claeys — Fri, 05 May 2006 08:23:52 +0000

Neat search method! But I doubt that people will ‘discover’ it because it’s not standard behaviour (yet) to select and right-click words on a web page.

By: Lon

Lon — Fri, 05 May 2006 08:12:10 +0000

It doesn’t even hide the standard contextmenu in my IE6.0!!! How easy is it to do that! Then why don’t they… Unless it is by design, then their design sucks. But for now I’ll assume their code sucks.

By: G.D. Sanders » Blog Archive » WSJ adds AJAX-based search functionality

G.D. Sanders » Blog Archive » WSJ adds AJAX-based search functionality — Fri, 05 May 2006 06:43:27 +0000

[...] WSJ adds selection based AJAX search [...]

By: Armin

Armin — Thu, 04 May 2006 23:20:31 +0000

Looks really good, and useful. Those two things are almost never come together