: Recommended approach for implementing breadcrumbs I want to implement breadcrumbs on a website, now I'm struggling on how to best implement them. Users can search for products but can also navigate

@Karen161

I have to disagree with the characterization of breadcrumbs in most of the answers because there is a difference (in my understanding) between categories or taxonomy (the nested hierarchy of categories that lead from most general to most specific e.g. Product Category > Product Sub Category > Product > Model or cars > sedans > chevy > impala > x5000 ) and the path through a website (I'm not talking about browser history, but a context-sensitive path).


If you were to search for four-door sedans and found a list of candidates then drilled down into one or more of those, it would be more important for you to ascend back to the list returned by the search result than to ascend the categories for whatever product you chose. (So, the example above might be "home > search > chevy impala x5000" rather than "cars > sedans > chevy > impala > x5000"


Using breadcrumbs to be a marker of where you've been is similar to choice 1 except you don't indefinitely add crumbs to the end because breadcrumbs are meant to be picked up to trace your path backward (and when you pickup a breadcrumb, all of the cumbs after that are removed because you've chosen a particular point in the path and will navigate from there.


If "breadcrumbs" are a category tree as some here have suggested, why do we call them "breadcrumbs"? My understanding of breadcrumbs is that they are path specific not model specific.

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