Book Excerpt

from Guided Search: Helping Your Customers Find Product (Chapter 7) Site search software of one kind or another is becoming less a luxury than a necessity for more and more web sites, both content sites and commerce sites. As the amount of stuff you have on your site grows, the less helpful a simple site menu is going to be. And if you are selling the kind of products that could possibly produce more than two layers of categorization, the search tool is a must. There are very few customers on the Internet who are going to work that hard to find product. They will be much more likely to click away to some other vendor who will not torture them with an onion-like catalog setup which they have to peel away before they can find the product they want. But, before you go find a handy free search tool such as Excite Search or FreeFind.com, or a freely available cgi script such as those made available by Matt Wright, you need to consider your search needs so that you can pick the right tool. Forrester Research published a report in April 2000 in which they listed five basic user functions required of a well-written search program. Most free search products will not meet all five criteria; how important the failure of any of the five will be to your customers is for you to judge. Here's their list: The search tool should find all the relevant content; The search tool should account for common misspellings and/or typos; The search tool should list results in order of relevance; The search tool should not produce irrelevant results; The search tool should product results that are useful. Does this list seem very elementary to you? It isn't. Wahmpreneur News Magazine's search tool, powered by FreeFind, does a fair job, but it doesn't completely pass this test. For example, while it does locate relevant content and even presents it in order of relevance (usually!), it also produces lots of irrelevant results. Why? Because it considers the entire contents of the webpages and Wahmpreneur has a menu in each article that lists every article in the issue. A search for "Women.Future" will produce not only the three articles in which that organization was featured, it will also produce every article that appeared in those same two issues of the magazine. FreeFind is also fairly useless when it comes to accounting for misspellings and typos. In fact, it can be a very good search tool if you are looking for something very specific, such as "ACEC" or "Women.Future" or "Commerce Department". More general search terms, such as "working at home", will produce a search result that encompasses just about every page on this site. On the plus side, FreeFind has two features that are very valuable and, to a certain extent, make up for some of its other shortcomings. Its search engine does provide the user with the ability to refine an existing search, so that even if their initial results do encompass every page in the site, they can revamp their search terms to narrow down the possible results. FreeFind also provides webmasters with usage reports, which are helpful for me and critical for a retail site with a catalog. Not only do those usage reports tell you what people are looking for when they come to your online store -- which can help you out with your inventory management decisions – but, if you can correlate those usage statistics with data on actual purchases, they tell you how really effective your search tool is. As limited as they often are, there are a few things you can do to help your free search engine perform as you need it to. Just as with the Internet search engines, your site search tool will need you to write title tags and meta tags that will help it out. The title tags are what the user will probably see in the search results as the titles of the pages found, and 15 pages called "glassware" doesn't give them enough information. Particularly in your catalog pages, make sure your title tags and your meta tag descriptions are specific to the product(s) on that particular page. Another method you can use to stack the deck in favor of your users being able to get truly useful search results is to use ALT tags in all your graphics. You are familiar with those, aren’t you? Here's a sample HTML format for a graphic display: img src="shirts-34.gif" width="120" height="160" alt="Boys' t-shirts, style 34" Now, for those of you who do not write your own code, this tells the browser to get a graphic file called shirts-34.gif from the same directory and place it on the page. The dimensions of the picture, given in pixels, are self-explanatory. And then there's the ALT tag. That text in quotation marks is what you see if you hold you mouse over the graphic for a few minutes. It is also what your users will see if your picture doesn't load for some reason, or if they have told their browser to skip the graphics for one reason or another. And, of course, the search tool reads it, too. The problem with this is that you know which t-shirt is style #34, but your searching customer probably doesn't. So, a much better ALT tag for this graphic might be "Boys' Pokemon t-shirt in blue, yellow and red" or something that will tell the customer what the item really is.