The Seven Deadly Sins of Site Search - Sin #6
Deadly Sin #6: Brand Confusion
As site search sins go, brand confusion is one of the easiest to find and least expensive to fix. Brand confusion occurs when either the search page title or search URL string reflects the brand of the company providing the search technology versus the brand of the company whose pages site visitors are searching.
You can see this sin illustrated on the search results page of United Technologies Corporation’s website in the graphic after the jump.
(You can also see it live on the UTC website):
United Technologies Corporation’s (UTC) search results pages
Look carefully at the URL string. Whose name is there? Something called “Mondosearch,” which is the name of a product by a vendor not in any way part of UTC.
What on earth is this product name doing in the URL for UTC’s website? Has UTC redirected the searcher to the Mondosearch website? Working for a search vendor myself, I strongly suspect that UTC uses its search vendor to host their site search, which is why the URL points to a subdomain of mondosearch.com. But I wouldn’t expect the average searcher to draw that conclusion at all. In fact, they might be suspicious at being pointed to a website other than UTC’s, and given all of the phishing scams out there, who can blame them?
A good rule of thumb regarding site search is that no matter how much you adore your search solution, the brand identity represented in the URL and search page titles should reflect your company, not that of the search solution and/or vendor used. Co-branding is fine (i.e. logos of search partners), but visitors shouldn’t have to worry about compromising their data security when visiting the site of a trusted brand.
Tags: brand identity, search engine, search solution, site search
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