I apologise for the title of the post – it’s fairly scentsless. Earlier this week I was listening to a Jared Spool webinar on site search: Search, Scent and the Happiness of Pursuit. In this webinar Jared discusses why people search, what a good search looks like and how you can improve your search.
Jared describes search, rather provocatively (from a site search vendors perspective) as an error condition. What he means is that people normally resort to search when they can’t find either what they want , or a “scent” that looks like it will lead them to what they want. Normally the scent is in the form of a “trigger word” – a word that triggers the user into clicking on the link associated with the word.
The trigger words are found by the users scanning the page and the most effective trigger words match the language of the users. Jared described a great way of discovering trigger words – examine your site search logs – that is look at what your users are searching for on your site. This resonates with me.
We encourage our customers to examine the popular searches reports and use these to influence the language used in their navigation. We even provide these popular searches reports broken down by category – which is particularly useful for large sites. We use these search terms in a variety of creative ways – they populate the auto complete list, the are used to generate related searches which are shown on the search results page, navigation pages and on product pages. We also use them to generate a page showing search terms. All of these help to provide a trigger word rich environment as you browse through our customers’ sites.
When talking about search results Jared said the most important aspect is relevance. I agree. He described four different types of relevance:
- Match relevant – the actual content users are looking for – this should be at the top (SLI’s learning algorithms are very good at bringing these results at the top)
- Relevant – These results will eventually lead the users to the content they are looking for.
- Irrelevant
- And no results (see my previous post on no results).
If you can produce relevant results then your site search will be helping your users achieve whatever tasks they are trying to complete on your website, eg buy something if you are an ecommerce site. This is the core value of site search.
One final point of interest I would like to highlight from the presentation was the assertion Jared made that the search vendor you use isn’t important – the implementation is. Surprisingly, I agree with this as well. You can build a good search with free software, like the open source Lucene and you can build a terrible search with expensive software (like Endeca) if you’re not indexing the right content, presenting the search results optimally or you mis-configure the search any one of hundreds of ways. Implementation is crucial. It pays to have someone experienced (like SLI) to implement your search because there are so many subtleties in setting up a good search, each business is unique and the best practises are continually being refined. Search is not a commodity – there is a lot of innovation happening in search and we’re proud to be contributing to that.
So if you’re interested in search then I recommend you take a look at this webinar – it’s not free – but it is informative.
