Qweery's look at the world of search

Just try a search in Google for something on a search engine (perhaps with the addition of optimising) and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all you get as results…it is very hard to find anything about optimising your own search engine although it is one of the most important function of a website….on article I like was (in dutch):
http://www.webanalisten.nl/analyse/bezoekers/investeren-in-zoeken-zinvol.html.

My guess is that SEO mainly only focus on getting higher ranking in Google and do this by optimising the content of the website, the link structure and most important: incoming links (this is not a SEO article so I’ll leave other more detailled options).

But what happens when you got that visitor, that lead from Google? Well…just picture what you do yourself. You judge the page you see and match it on the keywords you used in Google. If that is ok, you probably didn’t reach the exact page you are looking for (you don’t even know the site and have no idea wether this site contains the page/product you are looking for)….so what do you do? Two options: scan the naviation of hit the search function.
The search function is used the most (studies mention 50%+ )…mainly because the navigation just need to use the same words/terms you expect and almost never do.

So we’ve reached the internal search engine. In most cases a fulltext search function on the underlying database. Is this sufficient? For a very small website: yes….small meaning <50 pages in total. Is the site any bigger..no way. What about the ’special’ search options in webshops? Well, in most cases you get a category filter and that’s it. Still, search for any term and you’ll get hundreds of results….want to browse through all of them? Don’t think so and you’re off to another website.

What is the webshop manager to do? Well, check what you have looked for, check what result you saw and manage the results. Add synonyms, alter search terms for terms the shop uses, ignore some terms…is that enough? Uhm….nope. What about what other visitors did? Look at the big picture….Amazon was one of the first to use statistical information and showed visitors what other bought. You can use these ideas in search as well. Look for a search engine which helps you with this.

So, some pointers:
1) check what searches your visitors do (not in Google, but in you own engine) and make sure the content matches this
2) manage the keywords your visitors use and alter the query if needed
3) split product content with text pages in search with a searchfilter of in your resultset
4) make sure your best converting products top your resultsets
5) let important pages/products rank higher
6) show high marging or interesting promotions at the top of the results (not all, but keyword based).

Good luck…need any help. Let me know and I’ll have look if you want.

Even before Google, Altavista used the search channels ‘Web’, ‘Images’ and ‘News’ to let users devide search results. Google adapted this approach and I cannot understand why this remains.

I believe about 80% of all searches is done on the Web-channel and the search results become worse and worse. My main focus of search privatly is in Dutch and we cheeseheads seem to be into the secondhand markets….a lot. So what happens: anything you search for results in the first 10 pages in Google are ads from these market places (marktplaats, tweedehands, etc). Very frustrating if you are looking for productinfo from the original supplier.

My suggestion is to alter the channels into something like: general web, discussions, markets. This could be worked out in more detail but you get my drift. We incorporated this in the public Qweery search engine 3 years ago and got a lot of positive feedback on it. Not to tap ourselves on the back, the public engine won’t be here to see 2009, but I think this will be a true addtion to the mainstream search engines like Google of LiveSearch.

Now to think about how to determine which page goes where.
The way we did this at Qweery was: markets were identified by domain, so we kept a large list of domains which we believe are marketsplaces. A lot of work, but does work well.
Secondly the discussions or better: fora and blogs. Wel, this can be done much easier: just look at the url and if it contains forum or blog then put it in the channel Discussions. Maybe not very clean, but it seems to work.
I can image sites to abuse these kind of rules, so some other great thinkers should work this out in more detail, I guess.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Maarten Rooseboom

As of today, we at Qweery will post articles about search related topics. Some will be commenting on news, other articles will be to engage in a discussion with you. Keep track!

See you soon.
Qweery