Common Website Mistakes 10: Search as a Marketing Tool

Search functionality is a requirement in most of today's website projects. It helps new visitors navigate your content without having to understand the information architecture of your website. And even if they do, it does not harm to provide a convenient way to access information that might be buried deep somewhere in your site structure. Long story short: everyone typically agrees that you need a search.

Unfortunately, this is about the only thing easily agreed upon. As soon as you get into the concept phase, there are wild marketing requirements popping up from different stakeholders: Can expensive products be ranked higher than cheap products? Can products be ranked higher than articles? Can certain products be shown grouped and other products be excluded? Can we display some products differently in the search? Can we separate the search by tabs or accordions? Those requirements have one thing in common: They are driven by marketing motivations rather than practical ones, and they tend to make the search way more complex than necessary.

People only use a search if it works, and it only works if it is simple. Stakeholders tend to overload the search with niche features that are either too demanding for regular users or require too deep a knowledge of the underlying information.

What can you do?

Beware of the Google comparison

One of the things you will hear for sure at one point is "Just like Google". The reason is that pretty much everyone has had exposure to Google search in one way or another. People tend to mix up ease of use with ease of implementation and think a Google-like search is easy to build. Make it clear that it is unrealistic to recreate the world's most advanced search engine in the scope of your project with a fraction of the budget.

Keep it simple

Whatever you do, keep your search simple. A regular search should have an input field and a button. Everything else should come later: filter, facets, result ordering and advanced syntax are all things that can be used to narrow down the search results if - and only if - the search does not yield the desired result. In the majority of cases this should be unnecessary, and you should rather invest in improving the simple search than adding more filtering features.

Do not over-specify

The common sentiment when it comes to search seems to be: less results are better, with the optimum being a single result. Not only is such a search almost impossible to reach, it is also pretty unnatural when you think about it. When was the last time you Googled something and got only one result? If ever, you probably misspelled and accidentally entered the catalogue number of a niche product. The truth is: No one cares how many results a search yields as long as the desired entry is among the first ones.

Order is everything

In conjunction with the previous point, the order of search results is extremely important. Having lots of search results only works if the most relevant results are among the first hits. For a regular search, the most common default order is Relevance. Relevance is a pretty blurry term and might differ depending on your use case, but there are a few standard definitions that are good starting points. Take the scoring algorithm of Lucene for example (Lucene is a free search index that is used in many products). The algorithm has the following properties:

• The score for an entry is higher when the search term appears multiple times within the entry (search term is mentioned more than one)
• The score for an entry is higher when the search term appears in fewer entries (meaning the term is more specific)
• The score for an entry is higher when the entry is shorter (since longer texts have a higher probability to contain any word)

The charm of such a scoring is that it makes sense in most cases and is simply mathematically driven, so you won't find yourself arguing with different stakeholders about why their product is not in a certain spot in a search result list. Although it is possible to fiddle with the scoring, I generally recommend not to do so. Changes in the scoring can have fierce and unexpected consequences.

What do you think?

Do you agree? Did you experience situations where printing culture slowed down your publication process? Is this article helpful and would you enjoy similar content? Let me know in the comments.

Aknowledgements

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash