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In the context of developing a website, I am required to implement "point and click search" in addition to "normal search". Any idea what it means?

All I could find on the Internet is this browser plugin but it's probably not what they meant.

(Yes, the best would be to ask them directly but for some reason it would take weeks before I get an answer) They don't speak English so it might be a translation error.

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3 Answers

They could mean faceted classification. Each item you could search for would have numerous facets, each of which has one or multiple values. You can then find something by successive refining of a filter that narrows down the result set. Examples for this are numerous but most often found on online shows, such as Amazon. When browing for laptops you can filter for screen size, CPU, memory, HDD size, etc. All of those are facets.

Just a guess, it might be something totally different.

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Interesting idea, could be that indeed. –  Nicolas Raoul Nov 28 '10 at 11:41
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Here's an article on an app on the iPhone that does point and click searching. Does it sound like it's what you're looking for?

Here's an extract of the article:

Unlike other search engines, which rely on keywords to find results, the search technology from Proximic looks for patterns in the text to see where these patterns overlap. It then delivers relevant results based on these patterns.

Proximic co-founder and CEO Philipp Pieper believes that conducting searches in this manner provides more contextualized and relevant search results and also makes conducting complex searches much easier.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10112894-94.html#ixzz16OVxJNgs

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That's the link I gave in my question's second paragraph, when saying it is not what they want. –  Nicolas Raoul Nov 28 '10 at 11:40
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up vote 0 down vote accepted

OK, I asked and here is what they mean, it is very low-tech:

On a web page there are a few clickable areas, each representing a topic.
Clicking on a zone will perform a search on the documents that match the topic.

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