Faceted search, or guided navigation, has become the de facto standard for e-commerce and product-related Web sites, from big box stores to product review sites. But e-commerce sites aren’t the only ones joining the facets club. Other content-heavy sites such as media publishers (e.g. The Financial Times), libraries (such as NCSU Libraries) and even non-profits (Urban Land Institute) are tapping into faceted search to make their often broad range of content more findable. Essentially, faceted search has become so ubiquitous that users are not only getting used to it, they are coming to expect it.
Faceted search lets users refine or navigate a collection of information by using a number of discrete attributes—the so-called facets. A facet represents a specific perspective on content that is typically clearly bounded and mutually exclusive. The values within a facet can be a flat list that allows only one choice (such as a list of possible shoe sizes) or a hierarchical list that allows you to drill down through multiple levels (for example, product types, Computers > Laptops). The combination of all facets and values is often called a faceted taxonomy. Those faceted values can be added directly to content as metadata or extracted automatically using text mining software.
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