Category — Usability

If you talk about search or search engines to anyone in the web industry, they will normally assume you are talking about organic search as a means of generating traffic. Indeed, ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (SEO) is often at the top of everyone’s list of requirements when planning a web project, and rightly so. But what about your own site search? Does it allow those visitors your have enticed onto your site to find the right pages?

There is a view that site search is a last resort, your visitors will only use it if the primary navigation fails them. Designers often tend to believe that users will flow through the site in the way they plan them to, and that if they use the search feature the interaction design is faulty or the users a stupid (at least one designer has told me that!). But in this age of Google dominated Internet, people are not only becoming likely to use search as a primary interface, they are also becoming more demanding of the quality of the search experience.

I find it immensely frustrating when a site’s search gives irrelevant results. Indeed, more and more, I find myself using Google to search within a site instead of the site’s own search. What a tremendous waste of opportunity for these sites. Ok, Google’s collective brainpower is pretty amazing, but its also a general purpose search engine. The rules that decide which pages should appear at the top of the search results for a query on the entire Internet are not necessarily the same for a search on a specific site. If Google can do a better job at routing user queries to your pages than your site search, something is wrong.

With this in mind here are 5 tips to improve your search, in increasing order of difficulty (and expense!) to implement.

• Know where the sticking points are. These days, everyone and their dog has powerful web analytics at their fingertips, allowing them to monitor things like traffic sources and goals. But in my experience, not many people bother to analyse how users are using their site search. Google Analytics now offers powerful site search analytics for free. You can monitor what people are searching for, success rates (did they spend a long time on the site after the search and did they trigger a goal?) and lots of other stats. At the very least try the common search phrases and keywords out in your own site search. Do they take you to the pages you expect?
• Log searches that produce no results. If users are searching for something that does not exist on your site somethings wrong. Are they stupid? Are you using the wrong terms? Do you need to rewrite a section to introduce alternative keywords? You should log every query that produces an empty result page.
• Offer suggestions of misspellings. Fact: 99% of your visitors can’t spell. Its relatively easy to match misspelt words onto suggested correctly spelt ones. Also consider things like accent (Louvre v Louvre) and word stemming (boats, boat, boating).
• Handle special case queries intelligently. For most travel websites, queries such as ‘hotels in paris’ should rank hotels located in paris more highly than other things. You will need to pull out special cases to parse ‘X in Y’ queries and have the ability to set a search term and a location in your search system.
• Cross reference categories and other attributes. Offer jumping off points by showing the most likely category (or whatever) for the given query in your website.