Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Website search boxes
Raised as a usability problem by 7 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2011–2025), in 7 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Site search lacks full-text matching and steals keyboard focusUnreviewed
20112026- Search button and Enter key do nothing; Enter adds a newline instead2025-03-18
- Auto-focused search box hijacks keyboard back/forward navigation shortcuts2023-12-26
- Site search is useless, lacks full-text search and steals keyboard focus2022-11-14
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 7 complaints
- Most site search fields can't do even a single AND or OR2025-09-14
- Search button and Enter key do nothing; Enter adds a newline instead2025-03-18
- Auto-focused search box hijacks keyboard back/forward navigation shortcuts2023-12-26
- Site search is useless, lacks full-text search and steals keyboard focus2022-11-14
- Site's own search is slower and less effective than Google image search2021-02-17
- Search takes noticeably longer to return results than the AJAX version2015-10-18
- Site search boxes return poor results, so people fall back to Google site: searches2011-01-13