Search Done Right

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.

Deadly Sin #5: Egoism

This one needs a bit of an upfront definition. Egoism is a philosophy about making personal welfare and interests your primary concern, sometimes at the expense of others. Companies can be guilty of this as well as individuals.

We can see examples of egoism in site search implementations where the company asks far too much from a site visitor who wants to search, as in the following example from the Cadillac website.

First, in order to search the Cadillac website, you have to hunt for the search function that is hidden on the bottom left of the home page (circled in red):