Mike, one annoyance with your current MSA format is the necessity to hit “Find again” if you want to look up another player. I can see that you might need this to switch to a different kind of search (e.g. for tournaments), but for in-kind searches it would be a lot more convenient if the search box stayed open at the top of the screen.
John, the primary reason I take the search fields away when displaying the search results is that depending on your screen settings they can take up over half of the window.
The back arrow will work to get back to the search fields.
That’s quite true, but if you’re looking up a bunch of players while processing entries it’s a serious annoyance. I’d much prefer the convenience of keeping the search field open to being protected from a hypothetical problem which I’ve never encountered. How many others feel the same way? If many/most do, then their opinion should be more important than yours.
Well, the new player search interface has been out there for about two months now, you’re the first person to raise that issue about it, John.
Most [people will put up with annoying IT design on the assumption that there’s some good reason for it. That doesn’t make it good design, and in this case I don’t agree that there’s any good reason for it.
There we will just have to agree to disagree, I think it is outrageously BAD design to fill half or more of the available screen space with the input parameter fields when displaying the data from a search.
You’re begging the question, Mike. I’ve never seen the effect you’re describing. Under exactly what conditions does it occur? How many people would it affect? Are there really enough of them to make it worth inconveniencing all the others? Seems to me that, prior to your latest revision, the search box did, in fact, stay on the screen above the results. It was small, well-behaved, and very convenient.
There is the search again button that seems to work fine.
It’s an extra mouse movement and an extra mouse click for each search. Individually this is trivial, but if you’re processing dozens of entries it adds up. And it’s [i]not necessary[i]. Most commercial sites keep the search bar on screen (e.g. Amazon, Barnes & Noble). For that matter, the MSA did it that way before the latest revision. Why should we lose functionality? What did we gain in return?
Yeah, I noted that that search box did behave very well. It never jumped around, made noise or anything to distract me from my mission… 
Well, it didn’t spontaneously swell up and eat half my screen.
I agree with John.
I have long considered mentioning this problem on the UsChess.org forums, but I figured that realistically there would be no practical benefit from mentioning it.
Also, a search bar should not need to “fill half or more of the available screen”.
It is not a single ‘search bar’, it is a set of four search parameters (so far, others have been requested, such as limits by rating or recent activity), plus instructions on how to enter name searches.
Maybe it would be better to have a single search bar (like the old version in MSA) along with a button on the side for “Advanced Search” options.
Is there any data on what percentage of searches use the various other options?
There is no data on the extent to which the other search terms are being used at this time (other than numerous ‘THANK YOU’ notes from users), it might be possible to extract that from the Apache logs.
Followup: A quick check of recent Access logs shows that around 16% of the player-name searches use the ‘limit by state’ option. The ‘order by’ and which rating to show are used somewhat less frequently.
The ‘advanced search’ approach sounds like a good solution, I’ll work on that as I continue work on other parts of the MSA rewrite, but that probably won’t be until some time in March, at the earliest.
It probably makes sense to hide the search query hints unless requested, too.