The Vital Search Within

Posted on July 3, 2008 by Asi Erenberg

Making it easy for visitors to find what they want INSIDE your store is essential

“Search Within” might sound to the initiated like some eastern meditation technique, but of course in online commerce it’s much more down-to-earth. Search within your online site, enabling customers to quickly find exactly what they went once they’ve arrived at your site, is hugely important. And there are ways to ensure it works well, as well as some common pitfalls that can be avoided.

The simplest ideal, of course, is that a customer should see the very product s/he wants at the very moment of arrival; in such an ideal world the product (or service) would be sitting right there on your home page.

Maybe that ideal can be achieved by really good, tightly focused creation of your online store in the first place … your store has, and only has, precisely what the search customer wants. More likely, though, s/he has used search terms on Google or another engine that bring her/him to your homepage, in the strong belief that you offer – somewhere in this store – exactly what they want. Your aim is to present the desired directly to him/her within an absolute minimum number of clicks.

Your database must be structured soundly and comprehensively, with nothing left out by chance. And your search function needs to be flexible and “forgiving”. It can’t be over-literal or hung-up on specific punctuation styles. Or too tough on spelling variations – as this cartoonist points out – after being frustrated, it seems, by an online vacation-planning site.

Indeed, nothing can be more frustrating for a customer than knowing you have what’s wanted, but it can’t be found.

Every which way to search for the desired product or service must be covered; let the customer use an item’s name, its generic title, the categories of goods or services in which it can belong, everything you can think of. Logic and common sense are your best guides, but always err toward the wider, more comprehensive end of the scale, covering every possibility.

This way - just to quote one likely instance - someone wants from your (notional) online shoe-store some yellow women’s boots, and one click of the search button will bring them just that … bright, shiny yellow boots for women … and maybe even in the right size, if the customer has thought to enter that too!

Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.
A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document’s importance. Much better if your search engine calls out “best bets” at the top of the list — especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.