It was nice to see a story about site search today. The crux of the story was that Forrester had released a report showing that 56% of web sites didn’t have search engines that supported users’ goals. This is very definitely supported by what we see and I think it happens because it is very easy to create a bad site search and users’ expectations of search are continually increasing.

It is fairly easy to create a site search – a form where you type in some words and get back some results. Almost any web developer can use existing or free software to create this experience. Most content management solutions will come with some sort of basic search. But to create a good site search requires expertise and experience regardless of whether you’ve using free software or an expensive package you’ve bought for the job. Their is an art to;

• indexing all the content while not getting duplicates
• indexing the right text – for example it may not make sense to index the navigational text on each page
• presenting the search results in a format that most helpful to your users
• implementing and displaying refinement and sorting options
• and most importantly ensuring the results are as relevant as possible

This is one of the reasons why we chose to deliver our site search as a service rather than software. When we build site search for a customer the engineer assigned to the task has the benefit of years of experience across many different types of sites. The result is always a better experience than someone who is building site search for the first time.

The other reason why so many sites have search that does not meet their users’ expectations is that their expectations are increasing. The article referred to the Google effect – where people expect all search to be as good as Google. This is reinforced by those sites that do get site search right – with relevant, well laid out results that are easy to drill into, that quickly and easily satisfy peoples desire to find the information that they seek.

This entry was posted by Shaun Ryan on Thursday, March 9th, 2006 at 11:58 am PST and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.