Search box placement in British newspaper search result pages

Whilst surveying the search services of the British newspaper market, I looked not only at the placement of search boxes on the homepage, but also the subsequent placement of search boxes on the results pages themselves.

I have not included The Sun in this section, as their search results open in a small pop-up and so the positioning would not be a like-for-like comparison. Also it should be noted that I have included the Daily Star and The Daily Express, although they only offer web search and not an archive or site search.

Some newspapers feature more than one search box on their search results page. For example The Times and The Financial Times retain their standard masthead incorporating a search box, as well as providing a search box at the top of the results.

The Independent featured three different types of search box on their search engine results page - which allows the user to build up a complex query, but also effectively forces them to use advanced search for every query.

Other newspapers just relied on the one search box in their standard masthead - for example This Is London, the Daily Mail and The Mirror.

This diagram shows the relative positioning of search boxes on British newspaper search engine results pages. Click on the image to the see the diagram in full-size.

This post is part of a series of articles about the online search services provided by British newspapers.

The newspapers I looked at were The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Star, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, The Scotsman, The Sun, The Sunday Sport, The Telegraph, This Is London from The Evening Standard and The Times

Posted by Martin Belam, July 17, 2006
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