Search Done Right

After a long hiatus and more than a few comments reminding me that I am long overdue for the rest of this series, here is number four in the series of seven deadly sins of site search.

Deadly Sin #4: Complexity

Of all of the bad ideas with good intentions in search, omnipotence is one of the worst. Omnipotent search is the idea that the search engine will intuitively understand what the searcher is looking for and respond by answering a “question.” It typically doesn’t work well on corporate sites, except for specialized technical customer support sections.

Most often, these types of search engines give you an answer to a “question” that you never asked, and remove all other results that may have had the “answer.”

Here’s a hypothetical example. Let’s say someone is a Bank of America customer with a 16-year-old daughter who just got her first paycheck from a part-time job and wants to open her own savings account for a school trip next summer. They might go to the Bank of America website and type in the query “accounts for minors.” Here is an example of the search results they will receive from Bank of America. Or try the query yourself (you must enter a state in first)

Well, that didn’t answer the question at all, did it? A custodial savings account is not what they were looking for (unless the daughter can wait until she is 18 to withdraw any funds which makes it useless for her upcoming trip) and the search engine hasn’t given any other useful options. Now they either have to click on the link under “Can’t find it here?” or pick up the phone in frustration and call their local branch for information.

Given how much emphasis banks have placed on automation to reduce costs and increase efficiency, this probably isn’t the best outcome for the bank either.

As tempting as it may be to implement a search solution that attempts to mimic human conversation, it rarely works well enough on its own if you don’t give site visitors any other search results to look at, resulting in frustrated site visitors and increased customer support calls.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 12:48 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.