Search Done Right

I’m back in the office after a few weeks on the road presenting at seminars and trade shows where I was showing off the new social search capabilities in Velocity 6.0. The most common question I heard was about tagging search results with keywords - would employees really take the time to tag information?

Tony Byrne of CMS Watch addressed this issue in a recent post and discussed two relevant problems associated with enterprise tagging. The first is that many users can’t tag because they haven’t been given easy-to-use tools in order to do so (filling in 5 or more required metadata fields in a content management system doesn’t count as easy). The second problem is that of users who won’t tag - here Tony gives some good advice about creating incentives along with an institutional emphasis on organizing digital information.

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.

Deadly Sin #3: Complexity

In my previous posts on the seven deadly sins of site search, we’ve addressed the sins of omission (no site search) and apathy (poor site search). Today we tackle one that often occurs when a company is trying its best to help visitors find information by offering multiple search engines. For every large company out there that has no site search box, there is another that will have multiple search boxes.

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.

In a Forrester Research survey published last March, almost 50% of users surveyed said that the first thing they did when navigating an unfamiliar website was to use the site search function to find information. Yet, according to Forrester, more than half of the sites they recently reviewed failed to provide a comprehensive site search or search interface. It’s not uncommon for companies to spend upwards of $1M on a website redesign and then neglect or skimp on providing high quality site search.