Sunday, May 22, 2005

Always stay DRY

Programmers love acronyms: WYSIWYG, TMTOWTDI, RTFM etc. Here is one acronym that helps programmers deal with complexity:

DRY = Don't Repeat Yourself.

Whenever we search we juggle search terms, scrollbars, result links, and result pages. This all takes mental effort.

The principle of DRY should also apply to search.

We've only got so much time to spend and limited mental bandwidth to throw at our searching problems. One way to save our precious time is to make sure the tools we use don't make us repeat ourselves. The last thing we should be doing is repeating the same search. Where did I search for that? What did I search on again? Which result did I click on?

Ideally you should search for something once and for all.

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