I have live search on my site now as well and it’s pretty sexy. One of the things I don’t agree with is: “Use a live search type functionality to display results without going to a result page”

The Textpattern plug-in at least takes you to a search page if you hit return and I kind of like that.

Nicely incoporated in to your design though, it looks lurrvely! :)

Your new live search looks great.  Nice way of incorporating it into your site.  Some things I noticed.

In Opera 8 the search box is not flush with the top green line.

Also in Opera 8, when you use the arrow keys to scroll down the search items it actually scrolls the page too.  Weird.  Not sure if that can be helped.

In IE6, when I search for something like “tests” it displays the results fine, but if I backspace to “test”, nothing shows up.

And, just my opinion, it would be nice to have some sort of animated gif to let you know that the search is working, similar to when you are loading a page from Firefox.

Great work.
Success on Firefox 1.0.4 on OS X 10.3.8

I noticed the results on :hover doesn’t receive the same CSS treatment as using the arrow keys does. One solution is to giving it multiple classes. Something like:

//Key down
highlight.className += ‘ highlight’;
//Key up
highlight.className = highlight.className.replace(new RegExp(” highlight\\b"), ‘’);

When searching, in addition to your text under the input field, it would be nice to have some indication text like “loading” adjacent to “top results:” as it’s querying your DB.  I also think it would be nice if it functioned similar to a select.  When the area loses :focus, it hides the results, that can be expanded again, same functionality as clicking search again. I think your might need to change your “close(esc)” label to “clear” or “new search” because it doesn’t hide the searchboxwrapper div but instead, hides searchresult div.  Hope that helps.

Looks great and works fine in Safari 2.0. After using a lot of other ‘Live Searches’ I actually typed in a word and expected the results to show straight away. Only after waiting a few moments (as per your message) I thought I’d hit enter.

More of a personal issue more than anything I’d say, like Jon mentioned, the return taking you to a full blown search page is what I think people may be after.. unless they get the result they are looking for in the dropdown.

Well integrated into your site however.. good work.

* Works fine in Firefox 1.0.4 on Mac/Lin/Win
* Nicely integrated in your design
* It feels a bit slow, compared to the live searches of Binary Bonsai (which gives you results as you are typing) and 1976design (which maybe isn’t any faster than yours, but does provide a visual clue that it is searching something).

Without reading the other comments here are some thoughts.

Try not to make the search box expand past the bottom of the page, do a search for “c”, and youll get the idea. Perhaps a link, or button that lead to more results could help overspill.

Pressing “enter” should take you to the first result.

Add a spinny thing, ala Dunstan

When hovering the a result, make the whole row space clickable, use the same effect you have for the arrow keys perhaps?

Hitting close list and then repeating a search kinda make the search not work at all.

Search for “wrap”, the results dont quite fully mask the first colum and might be confusing with the information underneath, perhaps you could either make this column white when you search, or reduce the opacity.

Perahps you can cache the results so if I repeat one, the results are displayed instantly.

Using Firefox Windows 2000

It’s very nicely done, but it feels a little bit too slow. I think a “searching” graphic would be nice.

That’s just lovely!

Great search box . . . one little complaint.  I think another user mentioned this as well, but there _needs_ to be a way to show the user whether it is still searching, or nothing has shown up.  Currently it just shows no results until the results come, but since there’s a lag, it’s difficult to know whether it’s still searching or just found nothing.

Also, unrelated, a few notes the comment-form here (which I must say is very pretty), since I’ve never commented here before (although I’ve been reading for a while):
* The label for the text “Live Preview” points to the URL input area instead of the live preview checkbox
* The area that shows up when the email address input is active links to Gravatar, but when I tried to click on the link (Fx 1.0.4) that un-selected the input and thus the text vanished with the link I was trying to click on.  Not sure how to remedy that, though.  Could be Fx problem?
* Be consistent with your form labels.  Neither “Remember my personal information” nor “Notify me of follow-up comments?” are labels.  Bigger areas to click are better, and those little teeny boxes are a pain on today’s high-res monitors.

But really, great site.  I really enjoyed your series on typography. Thanks.

Followup:
Why, in the javascriptlive preview, am I getting textile commands converted properly, like _italics_ and
* lists

but in the post, that doesn’t happen?

It would be nice if what was inputted was remembered so that a user does not have to re-type the search terms after each time they click to investigate an article.

You could use PHP to GET the search terms and place them as a value attribute in the input element.

Sexy. I have one on my site. Pretty cool.