Make search more prominent on the home page

Question

This is the requested, uh, feature request from https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/251207/169018

tl;dr; Search should be a first-class citizen on the Stack Exchange network. Putting a bright and shiny search box front and center should help make it so.

I would really (really) love a more prominent search box than the tiny box in the upper right. My completely unfounded and likely wrong gut feeling says that if you make it more obvious that each site is searchable then the tide of poor quality or duplicate questions (on StackOverflow, at least) should recede somewhat.

Something like this:

For non-users, make the search the focus of the home page; I would assume the styling for the "intro" block could be leveraged. I can make a more fleshed-out prototype if requested.

Since I coped that search bar directly from the search results page, it goes without saying that most of the infrastructure is already in place. The major difference is adding some tooling to make it easier to transition the search into a new question.

Please note that this topic has been brought up before, without gaining too much traction - at the very least, I don't see any SO devs weighing in:

• Move search to the top center of stackoverflow and all other sites?
• Give greater dominance/placement to searching rather than asking for new/low rep users

Feel free to close this as a dupe of either one of those questions, if so inclined.

Answer 1

You already get search results when you ask a question:

Everyone will see these results, no matter which page they first landed on. I suspect not a lot of "new" question-askers enter the site by the front page; the front page is mainly used by people who primarily answer questions, who are exactly the sort of people you don't need to tell them to search first before asking a question.

This actually provides significantly better results than what you get if you enter the same sentence on the search page. Even after adding "is:question" and sorting by votes doesn't give me the top 2 questions in the list above, which is what we want.

Modifying the query to "external command python" does give me those results, though, and the search box has more options to filter content, but the search performed when you ask a question is a lot better at parsing a sentence and getting useful results, which is probably the type of query most people will enter.

So I'm not sure how useful such a prominent search box will be, it will be seen mostly by experienced users and not new users, and SE already provides a better (less intrusive) way to ensure a search before a question is asked.

Answer 2

In addition to the placement of the search bar in this mock-up, I like the surrounding text which prompts the searcher to be specific about their search, and encourages them to ask a new question.

On the Genealogy.SE beta, many new users arrive there via a Google search, after they have searched for a surname of interest to them. Because they don't have the rep yet to post comments, their first posts are usually posted as an answer to whatever question they find that way, as if we were a discussion forum. Often there is a seed of a new question in their posts, but since they are so used to surname-based discussion forums, they don't understand that they have related but different questions to ask. We have to nudge them to take the tour and ask a new question.

I understand that with any feature request, the needs of the high-volume sites need to be balanced against the slower ones. But we have a lot of new users coming to SE for the first time. Making the search box more prominent, and having these prompts at the top and bottom, might help them get up to speed faster with the way SE works.