Big Bright BBC Search

The BBC have re-launched their search service (not before time), it’s brighter, bigger and more web 2.0ey. It has more or less the same options as before but with the addition of a BBC Audio & Video tab.

There is also a re-designed audio/video box on the right hand side of the main search area, this used to only appear on news and sport searches.

I gave it a try by doing an All BBC search for my own name and came up with This and then to get a better range of content (something that should appear in every section) I searched for Jersey.

All of the BBC

I like the way this new search works and may end up using it more than google, mainly because of the inclusion of BBC content, but also because of the human edited BBC recommended sites feature.

In the search for Jersey (under All BBC), in the main area I get the latest news and sport headlines for Jersey, a BBC Best Bet link and then the search results.

Then on the right hand side in two easy to identify boxes I’m given three BBC Video links for Jersey (video clips added to recent news stories as apposed to a live audio feed for BBC Radio Jersey or listen again content) and two BBC recommends website links, one to Tourism and one to the Heritage Trust.

The two Right Hand boxes only appear on the first page of results, if you click next or a number (across the bottom) the boxes disappear and the navigation numbers stretch to cover the full width (800×600).

BBC News & Sport

Under the BBC News and Sport tab I still get the best bet links and just one right hand box, this time for the latest BBC Video stories for Jersey.

The actual links to news stories haven’t changed much, they feature the title of the story, with either news or sport before it, a summary over one or two lines, the word you searched for in bold, a relevance percentage and the date the story was published.

Audio & Video

The BBC Audio and Video tab is actually really nice, it defaults to showing you the clips in a grid layout, with three stories across in each row.

Each stories features a thumbnail from the clip, the title of the story, a video button and then a summary (again with the search word highlighted) and the date of publication underneath.

If you don’t like the grid layout you can change it to a standard list but to be honest I don’t know why anyone would actually want to.

Summary

All in all it’s a pretty good search service, complete with pretty graphics and a simple, user friendly interface but it doesn’t go far enough.

Ideally I would have liked to have seen the BBC’s podcasts, listen again service, rss feeds and external blogs included in the search service.

I’d really like to be able to search for say Mustard and be presented with a list of news stories, bbc websites, internal and external blogs, bbc radio and tv shows as well as photos and rss feeds relating to the word mustard.

This could have been addressed in the All of the BBC section (at least the BBC content stuff), on the right it could have given you recent BBC Blog posts, recent related message board discussions and if they get the metadata right recent radio shows about the subject (linking to listen again).

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