Qweery's look at the world of search

Updating our public label BoeZoe to crawl and index all childrens clothing in the Netherlands is quite a job.
We are working on the second version of the website and the biggest adjustment is the possibility to choose more than one item per filter.
For example sizes: most women (sorry guys, women mainly use this website) look for sizes like 50-56 AND 62-68. Because those little ones grow so fast and not all clothing are the same size (even within the same category) they want to search for more than one size at a time.
The second big change was the looks, for a sneak preview I’ll show both designs (old one first, new one second) below.

Current (old) version 1

New version 2

The new version is not live yet, we are testing it right now. And this is what we run into with our new filters: choose a filter and it won’t search, no it will select all items with that meta data. So it won’t do a search in the content for example the brand. This gives an unexpected result…well it did at first, but it is quite logical: there are 100+ shops we index and the use of a filter showed the clothes sorted by shop instead of best suited for the search query (which is not there wheen you don’t use the searchbox). Hmmmm…this is not what we want.

Should we now change our filters into predefined search words? I think we do. We’re gonna test it anyway. This will (as we expect) result in the regular search query and our algoritm will sort on best match in content.
We won’t do all filters this way. Brand, color, clothing type, size will be predefined search words. So if you select size 50-56 it will search for (maat 50 | maat 56 | mt. 50 | mt. 56) and the manually typed query will be added to that.
For pricing, state (new/used) we will keep the meta filters. Gender is still undecided at this time. We will test both and choose then.

So, if you want to build your own vertical search site, remember the use of meta filters is not always the best way to let user experience your search platform. It is a bit more work to manage predefined search words but the results are more as users expect.

Cheers,
Maarten Rooseboom