--- title: "Browse Versus Search: Stumbling into the Unknown Unknown [Organizing Content 9]" date: 2010-05-26 description: "Findability / organizing content 1.0 New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1] 1.2 Introducing Project..." canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2010/05/26/browse-versus-search-organizing-content-9/ --- # Browse Versus Search: Stumbling into the Unknown Unknown [Organizing Content 9] I will admit that we're a search-driven culture. Our fascination with Google is that it seems to contain answers to nearly any question we ask it. We search for information, and we find it. As a result, we can skip all the old-school navigation and just give users a search box, right? Not exactly. ### Search versus browse modes Users who browse have different purposes than those who search, and we can't assume that those who browse can find content the same way through a search. [Geoff Sauer pointed this out in a previous comment](https://idratherbewriting.com/2010/05/19/topic-based-hierarchical-navigation-organizing-content-5/comment-page-1/#comment-151612), explaining the following: > After Rosenfeld and Morville's 1998 book *Information Architecture for the World Wide Web*, the field began to differentiate between two discrete behaviors — “browse” and “search.” People who browse the EServer TC Library's Careers>Technical Writing section are behaving differently and have different goals than people searching for a particular article. A user browses a table of contents when he or she is looking around to see what's there, usually moving with a mind open *to discover new things*. In contrast, a user searches content when he or she needs to locate a specific piece of information. We do this all the time. When you fire up your computer in the morning and go to [Google Reader](https://google.com/reader) or [nytimes.com](http://nytimes.com), is your first action to use the search box and search for content? No, you skim the headlines, you browse the most popular articles, you look at what's new. You don't use search because your primary intent is to discover new things. And this is where search has its limitation: lack of discovery. A user relies on search to find specific information he or she already knows or suspects to exist. Rarely does a user search for something he or she doesn't even know to search for. For example, let's say I download Photoshop CS5 and I'm playing around with the application. In a moment of idleness, I open the help and browse through the content. There I read the words "content fill," and start learning about a feature I didn't know existed. I would have never thought to search for "content fill," but it's in the help. Content fill, by the way, is the ability to extract subjects from an image and have Photoshop automatically fill in the background in a seamless way. It's one of those *wow-I-didn't-know-a-software-program-could-do-that* moments. Now that I know the term, I can search for "content fill" and find more specific information about the topic. But previously, when I didn't even know content fill existed, it's not something I could have searched for and found. ### The Unknown Unknown In [The Future of Search and Discovery](http://2010.iasummit.org/talks/9765), Peter Morville notes that one limitation of search is finding out the "unknown unknown." This term, the "unknown unknown," comes from Donald Rumsfeld, Morville notes. The full Rumsfeld quote is as follows: > There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know. Rumsfeld's political use of this term in the context of Afghanistan drew considerable controversy, and there's [an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to the term Unknown Unknown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_unknown). In fact, in the article, two Italian economists expound on the idea of the unknown unknown in a more elaborate way: > A subject is certain of something when he knows that thing; he is uncertain when he does not know it, but he knows he does not: he is consciously uncertain. On the other hand, he is unaware of something when he does not know it, and he *does not know he does not know* [emphasis added], and so on ad infinitum: he does not perceive, does not have in mind, the object of knowledge. The opposite of unawareness is awareness. I could think of about a dozen examples of unknown unknowns in my life, but my focus here is with user help. How many times have you been using an application, and have grown comfortable with it, only to discover one day that the application has a feature you had no idea existed? It happens to me often. When I experience one of these "oh, I can do that?" moments, it's exciting. It puts me on top of the world. It's an information high. If all you give your users is a search box, you deprive the user of these moments of discovery.