Blog1 min read
On not having a search box
The site is small enough that search would mostly slow you down.
There's no search box on the site, and there isn't going to be one. The whole site is small enough to read in five minutes. A search box would mainly slow you down — you'd type a thing, hit enter, look at a result page, and at no point would you have moved faster than just clicking through the navigation.
Search makes sense on a site that's too large to be browsed. This site is small on purpose, and the navigation is supposed to be the table of contents. If you can't find something in three clicks, that's a structural problem, not one a search box should paper over.
Blog posts are a slight exception, but the archive is still small enough to scroll. Each category page also surfaces the posts tagged to it, which does some of the work a search would do without forcing the listener to formulate a query.
Most search boxes on small sites exist because the designer didn't know what else to put in that spot. The blank spot was the right answer.