Directed/refined/questionnaire Searching

[fatbear]

Is there a contribution that allows for directed searching: where a user can either click on a series of links or make radio-button choices that refines at each choice. For example, suppose sells clothing:

 

Home Page: Allows choices mens, womens, childrens, outerwear, etc.

 

Suppose the user clicks on "childrens" -- then, the user goes to a new page in which they can choose from boys, girls, babies, toddlers, jumpers, t-shirts, etc.

 

Then, the user clicks on "jumpers" and they see the collection of jumpers.

 

I suppose there are many ways to accomplish step-by-step searching where at each step the shown catalog is reduced. It would be especially nice if at each decision point there could be "home pages" for the subset. In the above example, the home page would have general appeal, the children's "home page" would have a design and text that appeals to that market segment, etc.

 

For a photo website, I can imagine one first searching for one element that is wanted in the photo, then another, and yet another. Eventually, the catalog is pared down enough that the user finds just what they're looking for. For each photo (just like clothes), I imagine metadata keywords being entered for any item. Directed searching provides for search "home" pages when the set of keywords being searched on is some specific set of words. Anyway, that's how I'm imagining that I'd implement this should I try to write a contribution myself. If there isn't yet any such contribution, please feel free to share what you think would be good here so I can try to do it.

 

Thanks for any leads in this direction!

 

Fat Bear