Interesting little study, something I never would have thought would have made a major difference. I would have alwways thought that if it was important, it would be enough just to highlight it.

But after reading this, there's clearly some benefit in having it set at the average or above.

good study. 25-30 sounds about right. most product queries probably wouldn't go too far beyond that character amount where as a search engine search box would no doubt probably benefit from being longer.

That's a really interesting study. I always found Apple's search box to be absurdly tiny. Although I'd never heard Nielsen's recommendation, that number really "feels" right.

However my Amazon box seems to be SIGNIFICANTLY larger than yours...

http://cl.ly/22f1eeede4abcf147f80

That's 100 characters on the nose.

That's quite an interesting study, thanks.

Thanks alot for the interesting study!

In fact, after looking at your gathered PNG file, I would love to follow up on the study trying to find what each search button is saying. For example, how many of them are saying, Search, Find, Go ...etc.

Previously I was not informed about it.Thank you for sharing and very interesting post.

Part of it I think can be geared towards what users are likely to search for. Sites like Amazon need to be able to handle full book titles w/ authors and search engines entire sentences relatively nicely.

However, sites like Victoria Secret would rarely have long searches anyway just because the likelihood of searching for a specific item is lower. This also applies to sites like Best Buy where you are more likely to look for a generic term like "bluetooth mice" than a specific bluetooth mouse.

Nice information. Thank you. Adding to your list, the BIG search guy, GOOGLE also showing 50 characters.

Yup cool.. i go for 27.. :)

FYI: Amazon's search box is designed to stretch across the screen, thus is dependant on your browser's resolution. Try resizing your browser window or change your screen res. So your results will only be valid for a specific screen res (which is what btw?).

I wonder if any of the other websites are the same?

It would seem that for some sites a larger search box is better but your article simply assumes that these popular sites are right and have research somewhere to prove it. What if you WANT your user to browse and you have excelent navigation. I would like to see some real analytics to back up your assumptions or else you are blindly following the big boys....who have been known to be wrong or simply following a trend before.

Excellent article! I'm dealing with this very question of search box size with a present client of mine.

And what about auto wide with css and jquery ? Is there an example somewhere ? Juste like thé comment box in Facebook...