Just for you, we have a sneak preview of a new search we’re implementing on Cisco.com.We think you’ll like it, and here’s why.Normally, if you search for a topic on Cisco.com or most other sites — whether it’s a really technical topic or something more general — you’re innundated with results from all over the site.For instance, say you’re in a small business just getting into networking and you’re curious about a topic like “difference between a router and a switch”…
On Cisco.com, you’ll get a rich assortment of 4,000 results, and frankly the ones at the top may not be what you want…
Why such a jumble of results? Because, really, how’s the search engine to know what you’re trying to find? Or that in fact you’re in a small business as opposed to, say, running a big enterprise IT group? But, if you try the same search in our new search beta, you’ll notice you get a lot more control…
Look on the left side of the picture: You can actually narrow down, filter, or expand searches based on criteria like business size (here’s a close-up)…
So that you get a nice subsetted list of the documents that are really appropriate to what you’re looking for (just three relevant entries!)…
And can zoom in on just the right document…
There are a lot of nifty features, like auto-suggest of search terms, which I’ll write more about soon.And, since this is Beta and we’re still doing a lot of tuning, be sure to leave feedback via the floating feedback link on the page.Enjoy!P.S. You’ll notice there’s a link to the new Search Beta in our regular search results, too. Be sure to compare and let us know which you like better and why.

I can’t tell you how happy I was to hear that someone was working on a new search tool. It seems like quite an improvement based on a couple simple tests I ran using the Beta version. Thanks!Is it possible to expand the searches so they include PDF docs? At least cisco.com index entries for PDF copies?