learns something from my freshman comp students.
On March 13, 2000, I e-mailed web guru Jakob Nielsen to tell him that six of my freshmen spent 8-30 minutes on his site without finding a plain-text “search” link on the home page. A week or so later, I noticed that Nielsen changed his page, making the search feature much more visible.  (See: before and after search option improvement.)  About a year later, Nielsen reported that the change had increased use of his search box by 91%. —Jakob Nielsen