Search boxes are becoming more and more important as the number of people that prefer to search instead of browsing grows. Search could seem to be easy to implement but it’s not, apparently, as I have found many examples of bad design.

Yahoo! search box is a master piece of design. Everything is clear and they don´t use fancy wording. As expected, when the user clicks on Images, the button changes to “Images Search”. The same happen with Video, Local and Shopping.

Digg is another good example. The search box is placed on the top right corner, exactly where most users would look for it.

Barnes & Noble search got a good piece of the home page but it does not allow to search all the categories (only books, only DVDs, etc.). Usability failure for Barnes & Noble.

The worst design example I found was at PayPerPost, the company that pays bloggers sums for writing articles (soon to be called “izea”). This site it’s giving too many options to search forum posts without a simple search-go search box. Search keywords, author, category, sorting, etc. I would leave this for an advanced search function and not for normal users. I wonder if PayPerPost has ever tried this search with users. The PayPerPost site won a place in the site’s inferno.

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.