Search Done Right

Deadly Sin #2: Apathy

Apathy is probably the most common of the site search “sins” you will run across on large corporate websites. It is also one of the biggest reasons why users may bypass your site search completely and instead conduct the same query using one of the popular web search engines.

Apathy occurs when a company invests in a search engine to crawl its website, places a search box in a prominent place on the home page and then doesn’t check to see how well it functions. Judging from the poor or even abysmal results many site search engines produce, few are testing the quality of their site’s search results.

Poor results can take many forms: returning documents that have minimal relevancy to the search query, summaries of the results that don’t describe what is in the document or bewildering document titles. For an example of all three, let’s take a look at a search done on the term “environment” on the website of the second-largest oil refiner in the United States, ConocoPhillips*:

Click to enlarge

Unless the visitor is Sherlock Holmes and can deduce the meaning of each one of these document titles (“Layout 1”, “printmgr.file” and “Screen” might be especially difficult), they would have to click on each of these 500+ results to see if it really contained anything pertinent to their query since the descriptions aren’t helpful in determining relevancy either. It is doubtful ConocoPhillips has many searchers willing to work this hard to find what they were searching for when a consumer web search is likely to provide a better answer with far less work required.

Don’t feel that ConocoPhillips is alone in providing poor site search results, they have plenty of company. See it for yourself – pick a half-dozen websites at random from the list of Fortune 500 companies (choose ones that aren’t e-commerce sites) and try searching on the exact same term, “environment.” How many of these sites produced good results in terms of relevancy, accurate summaries and meaningful titles?

Now try it with your own website using additional queries. Are you happy with the results? If the answer is no, find out if the underlying search engine can be tuned to produce results that will satisfy visitors. If not, it is time to shop around for a replacement that will - unless you really believe that poor search results have no impact whatsoever on your brand and company reputation.

*Note: The companies selected as examples for the “Deadly Sin” series were chosen at random from a list of Fortune 500 web properties and are only used to illustrate common site search problems. It is not the author’s intention to single them out as unique in regards to site search.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.