I saw an excellent write up about winning strategies for no results pages by Greg Nudelman. Greg includes plenty of examples of what does and doesn’t work. I recommend reading it. Here is a list of some of the things that we do around the no results page.
First of all we try to reduce the number of times that the no results page is shown through the following techniques:
- The auto complete feature helps people formulate their query as they type. The suggested phrases always have results.
- We report on the search terms that have no results. Often this is caused by your visitors using different language than you use on your site. This can be remedied by either using that language on your site or adding synonyms. It can also indicate products/information that your visitors expect you to have that you don’t carry. You can use this information to help expand your product lines – based on what your visitors are asking for. Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty talks about doing this in this interview
- Similar to the Amazon example that Greg gives, we fail over if there are no results that contain all of the words in the query – we will show results that contain some of the words, with a message describing what we are doing. Note: Not everyone reads the message so in some cases this causes confusion.
On the no results page we will:
- show spelling suggestions using the Did you mean language. These suggestions are drawn from the language on the site
- show popular searches – I’m a fan of this
- show popular products – this can also cause confusion – visitors may not read the message that you have no results for their search term and assume that the popular products are the search results.
- show keyword specific banners – for example if there is a search term for a product that you no longer stock then a banner may be a good way of saying “we no longer carry this product range – here are some alternatives.”
As an aside – one of Greg’s examples that highlighted the ”Did you mean” functionality was a Google search for asdasdasdasdasdasddfgh. If you do that search – his page is the top result (undoubtedly this page will be in the results set shortly as well).
March 18th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Sometimes we show navigation links and some help text on the no results page See this example on Etrailer. (Thanks for pointing this out Blair)
May 26th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
[...] I noticed that they seem to do an OR search by default. That is they show you results that contain any of the terms in your search query. For example when I clicked on one of their Hot Topics shown above the search box – Susan Boyle. I was surprised to see that there were recipe results for the amateur Scottish signing sensation. On closer inspection they appeared to be showing because there are recipe results that contain the word “Susan”. Doing an OR search like this does mean there will be more results – so you are less likely to show no results. But it also means there can be a lot of irrelevant results. I recommend showing AND results by default – that is results that contain all the words in the query. If there are no results you can fail over to show results that contain some of the words. (A previous blog post discusses more strategies for the no results page) [...]
July 19th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
[...] And no results (see my previous post on no results). [...]