Delimited search

Interface design expert Jef Raskin critiqued delimited search (compared to incremental search) in his book The Humane Interface:

With a delimited search, the computer waits for the user to type a pattern and delimit it, after which it is the user who waits while the computer does the search. When using a delimited search the user must guess, beforehand, how much of a pattern the computer needs to distinguish the desired target from other, similar targets. With an incremental search, he can tell when he has typed enough to disambiguate the desired instance, because the target appeared on the display. (..) In spite of near agreement about the desirability of incremental searches on the part of both designers and users, almost all interface-building tools make it easy to implement delimited searches and difficult or impossible to implement incremental searches.^[1]

• If It Isn't Incremental, It's Excremental Archived 2009-07-13 at the Wayback Machine — Programming and Human Factors by Jeff Atwood.

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