

a mockup of a standard webpage layout



What are the usability trade-offs if it's left out?

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  • very important!!? – Ebenezar John Paul Nov 15 '13 at 12:02
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    The answer is easy. It depends - for some sites it will be essential for some not. Please, specify type of site to give you relevant recommendations. If you want to find out it is a good idea to look at your analytics data to see how frequently it is used. – Kristiyan Lukanov Dec 16 '16 at 14:20
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23 Answers 23





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  • Also,not all users would be savvy enough with google's site: keyword. For them having to go back and google something might seem like a lot of work with no promised solution – TDsouza Dec 20 '16 at 17:22






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  • +1 for it's quite possible that your competitors may appear higher in the list of results – Ooker Dec 28 '16 at 9:46







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This research by "think with Google" titled "Principles of Mobile App Design: Engage Users and Drive Conversions" from March 2016, gives a series of principles for apps usability based on studies of "more than 100 people on 100 different apps".

We partnered with AnswerLab to conduct a user study of more than 100 people on 100 different apps across a variety of verticals including e-commerce, insurance, travel, food ordering, ticket sales and services, and financial management. (Gaming apps, social networking apps and music services were not included in the study.)

The study is focused on Mobile apps.

As many as 25% of app users open an app once and never return (Source: eMarketer “App Marketing 2015: Fighting for Downloads and Attention in a Crowded Market,” July 2015).

More than ever, people are engaging with their phones in crucial moments and for shorter periods of time. Their experiences need to be efficient and delightful. Plus, a well-designed app that provides utility has the power to cut through the clutter. It can deliver on people’s many I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-buy, and I-want-to-do moments.

In Chapter 2 it gives several principles about the use of search functionality in Mobile apps.

In-App Search

Effective and useful app search is crucial for helping app users find what they need. (...)

This point is significant about the search box:

6. Prominently display the search field.

Users with a specific task or need will typically look for a search field. They often prefer this to browsing. Apps that do not have a prominently placed search box can cause user frustration and slow the user down.


The search functionality is hidden behind a menu option.


An exposed search field is easily located.

I only included the point relevant to the search box. Other points in the document include principles about search results, search filtering, etc.




Highly recommend Lou Rosenfeld's "Site Search Analytics" text.

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The search box is not a substitute for good content organization.



Levine - Sun Microsystems guide to web style



  • Added links in first comment – Brad Hutchison Mar 2 '12 at 21:13







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In 2001, Jakob Nielson published an article that explains the usefulness of search box and he summarized " Search is the user's lifeline for mastering complex websites. The best designs offer a simple search box on the home page and play down advanced search and scoping".

Users love search for two reasons:



Search is a big deal and based on the research conducted by Jakob Nielson and Norman groups, titled " Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question" and conluced that poor search was the greatest single cause of reduced usability across intranets we have seen, aside from the general lack of executive support and budget. Search usability accounted for an estimated 43% of the difference in employee productivity between intranets with high and low usability.

In an attempt to prove the usefulness of a search box in the website, He"Nielson" replaced a link in one of the website by a search box and that increased by 91% of the usage.

Search On Mobile Devices ( Web and Native app).

To avoid opinionated answers, I am only going to list down number of research about search, the magnifying icon, the autosuggestion and other 62 design recommendation for both web and mobile devices.

All of these research are dated on 2015 and done by the top ux experts such as Nielson and Norman.

References :

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    Do you feel that the research you've cited from 15 years ago is still relevant? Also given that @bakabaka's bounty specifically states "I am curious whether the answer to this question has changed with the marked increase of mobile website use in that period." and you've presumably answered this question in hopes of receiving the bounty, do you feel that the research cited adequately addresses the mobile web that literally didn't exist when the research was conducted? – zzzzBov Dec 18 '16 at 1:38
  • @zzzzBov, I believe Dr.Nielson always updates his research and keeps on providing different test result in different platform, such as " the use of magnifying and search icons in mobile devices". I am not hoping for bountry, I usually come here to read and learn from others and share a solid evidence answers rather than opinionated comments :). Cheers and have a great day. – Serag Alzentani Dec 18 '16 at 6:09
  • @zzzzBov I have updated my answer, hope this will be useful to you and Mr.Bakabaka. – Serag Alzentani Dec 21 '16 at 1:38


The questions you will need to ask yourself are :









It is purely depends on the requirement. The search box implementation to the website is a additional feature to make user more comfortable with your website, if you have more pages and contents.

In this case we should have search box to search the content instead of rolling the contents using mouse or keyboard.

If the website is a E-Commerce / Blog / Media related, we defenitely implement search feature there. The main reason to implement this feature is usability and depends on the website we going to work.











As many have said already, it really depends on the type of the website.

Content heavy websites for e-commerce, collecting documents, asset management, real estate, heavily rely on search to allow users to find what they are looking for. There is a lot of research out there, books, blogs that cover this area.

E-Commerce Search Usability

Marty Hearst : Search User Interfaces

Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success

Sites with a simpler nagivation hierarchy and less content to search for usually don't invest in site level search and I believe it is for a good business reason. In these cases, search is more of a "nice to have" feature that sldom makes it to production.

This kind of decissions have also lowered the confidence of the users that search will give them any good results, or any results at all.


For the question in the bounty: "I am curious whether the answer to this question has changed with the marked increase of mobile website use in that period."

According to Material design search should be present when an app supports large amounts of information. So the main idea is that the search action should be present where there is a significant amount of content. Depending on the way the app the search can get more or less importance in the UI.

enter image description here

When an app supports large amounts of information, users should be able to quickly locate content by searching for it.


Basic search involves:

  • Opening a search text field

  • Entering and submitting a query

  • Displaying a set of search results

There are two types of search patterns depending on the importance of the search action:

Persistent search

Use persistent search when search is the primary focus of your app.

For example Google Maps where the search action is the main action.

Expandable search

Use expandable search when search is not the primary focus of your app.

For example Google Keep where the user can navigate through the app and use the search action if needed.

Material design guidelines was developed by Google in 2014 and is still being updated with new content.

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    Citing material design's guidelines does not constitute research. That's not to say material design isn't based on strong evidence, but my question asks for evidence, not anecdotes. – zzzzBov Dec 18 '16 at 1:35
  • No problem @zzzzBov. I didn't mean I did research, just show some evidence from Google encouraging the use of the search for mobiles nowadays. The accepted answer and top old ones, really make the best points I can think of, which I believe are still relevant today. – Alvaro Dec 18 '16 at 9:45

There is an exelent article with sources of different researches. I'll extract the elementary points in the question but I recommend to check out the whole article: Search vs. navigate: How do people behave on websites?

So to quickly answer your question, this is the important point:

So, do you really need internal search box on your site since we “already have” Google now? If your website has an advanced structure and significant amounts of content, then the short answer is YES, because in order for any website to be effective, it should be easy for visitors to engage with it and find the content they are looking for — and people are different and use different methods to accomplish tasks.

Do you need a search bar on your own website?
Think it differently: When a user visit your site, does he search something specific (e.g a product) or does he only explore your site or want to know your prices (e.g if you're a agency)?
If the answer is specific, then you should implement a search-function to ensure, your user reach his goal fast.

And there are user who are more likley to use the navigation, other use rather a search bar. So don't exclude the second type of user on a complex website.

You want some numbers to prove that users are using an inbuild search? Here's another quote from the article:

According to Comprend 59% of web visitors frequently use the internal search engine to navigate on a website (...)

If you want to know more, make sure you check out the linked above article. He covers everything you need to know. Oh, and it was written in 05.2016. So it's newly researched.

Another great article about why you should provide an enhanced on-site search: http://bma-milwaukee.org/press-releases/the-value-of-enhanced-on-site-search/
And a great article, that a better on-site navigation is more important: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-navigation/


Developers design and implement search features because it is an easy thing for them to do. However, often there is no rhyme or reason for implementing search.

Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender wrote a great book called Search Patterns: Design for Discovery, and this shows there are many search and findability patterns, each serving specific situations, goals and motivations. There are also some anti-patterns you need to be aware of.

Ideally you will perform some user research where you speak to real people, to help you discover their specific needs. The results of this user research may surprise you.

They have a website to accompany the book: http://searchpatterns.org/



This is kind of an open ended question which is very difficult to answer comprehensively without information about what it is you're trying to do. As has been noted in numerous answers, I think you're unlikely to find gospel truth on this topic. Research that is true for some websites (eBay, Amazon, etc.) may not be true for others (WordPress blogs, for example), and your target demographics and implementation complicate this further (hypothetically, an eBay clone targeted at geriatrics may not see as much searching and more reliance on menus, and if your search is mediocre and your menus are amazing and intuitive, people may gravitate to those naturally, skewing your metrics). I'll post some trade-offs and considerations since other answers have some decent examples on research.

The obvious are thus:

+ Your site is simpler in design and has less visual clutter.
+ There is less work required to implement your website.
- Users who like to search can't search anymore.

The importance of this varies depending on the site. Generally speaking, considerations could include:

  • The quality of your search results (which has flow-on effects; free search tools tacked on to websites from third parties are often rubbish in my experience (and from the question, yours also), exacerbated when the website doesn't have good internal structure already. Conversely, you wouldn't use Google to search for Facebook users over Facebook search, would you?).
  • The nature of target demographics (many folks aren't as aware of the power of modern search engines).
  • The preferences of target demographics (say, target users who like/prefer to search websites directly over using your provided browsing links/search engine).
  • The format of your site's content and its interaction model (your point about searching via the browser isn't practical when on eBay for example. What's faster, searching the site directly ("door handles") or typing "ebay door handles" via your omnibar (or equivalent).
  • The need for more than a basic search tool (smart search, filters, result refinement, topical suggestions, etc), potentially necessitating a custom one.

And so on.


As with pretty much all these types of questions the answer has to include "it depends"

Personally I design as though the site search doesn't exist, but very rarely would it be something I'd recommend removing.

Having facilitated hundreds of user testing sessions, when given a task there is a recurring answer from users which is "I would just use the search". Testing is a bit of unrealistic scenario, so it may well be in a lot of those instances they would actually have performed the search external of the site using Google/Bing.

I have also identified that there are typically two different types of participants: "searchers" and "navigators". "Navigators" will always try to navigate via the menu structure and hyper links presented to them. "Searchers" are more likely to gravitate towards the search bar, with an expectation that it will solve their problem (Personally I expect them not to work particularly well!). Obviously there are mixed behaviours dependent on the task.

I would think very carefully before considering removing existing search functionality. Do some testing and look at the metrics to understand whether it is being used.

Further reading:






Since the question was asked more than 4 years ago with a lot of answers proposed but none was accepted, I assume the author is expecting something else. A survey of existing answers generally fall into two groups:

  1. In-app search is important therefore a must-have.
  2. Whether in-app search is indispensable or not depends on factors such as site size, site category, targeted user etc.

Regardless of the choice, conclusion is often made by comparing with another UX behavior - navigation. Both behaviors assume user has already landed on the site. The question, however, seems suggest that comparison should be made against external search services such as Google. Indeed, the question that ought to be investigated is: with increasingly improved accuracy of external search engine, what percentage of successful search is achieved within the app as opposed to user hitting the destination page referred to directly by external search engine after entering a query of which specificality is progressively improved with the assistance from the external search engine, taking into account information that is unavailable to in-app search such as user's location, historic overall search and navigation behaviors etc?

Unfortunately I haven't found any relevant up-to-date academic-grade research. But from both personal experience and from the fact that some popular sites such as the following have no site-wide in-app search feature, yet no usability nor SEO ranking is affected

I tend to believe for CMS and blog type of web sites of which core content is not too volatile and accessible by general public anonymously, hence crawlable by external search engines, site-wide in-app search is becoming non-essential.





  • With the recent activity on this question, I'm interested to know if you've published your research. – zzzzBov Dec 19 '16 at 17:54

The answer depends entirely on your site and your site's users.

You can't know the answer unless you've tracked your user's behaviors on your site. Tracking tools such as Hotjar offer you insights into what your users are doing on your site. It offers you the ability to create funnels to allow you to see how your users navigates from page to page and where they are having issue.

Other analytics tools such as Optimizely allow you to test out no search vs. search or prominent search vs not prominent search box on your site to determine which method works best for you.

There's no quick answer to your question unless you do the research and find out for yourself if search is relevant on your site to your users.

  • I love it when people down vote without providing explanation. – Chairman Meow Dec 29 '16 at 19:06

protected by Community Jan 18 '17 at 14:49


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