OMGICU Search
Another fun OMGICU.com experience. One of the big challenges of this product was navigation and find+searchability.
The content objects consist of celebrighty sightings (stories), venues, celebrities, and sources (users). In addition, we decided to pull in a handful of APIs to tag and give attributes to all of these content objects. Our celebrities pull in all related wikipedia tags, our venues come from foursquare and sometimes yelp api for tags, and our sources get info pulled in from tweety bird.
After gathering all this, the challenge was to give users an elegant surprise and an easy way to discover entertaining groupings of celebrities, celebrity sightings, and venues. The solution was a smart search suggestions informing users with not only recos for their search but also identifying what type of content each suggestion was and a tiny snippet of lead in content to give them a hint as to what the suggestion was.
We will continue to improve search, as this is just our first phase. Attachment shows a full example, and to peep the working experience, check out the site and start typing random letters and have some fun. Some personal favorites:
http://www.omgicu.com/tags/1085-Parade-High-School-All-Americans-football-