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

Plain websearch on public engines like Google, Yahoo and such or on a website mainly consist of a single input type text box to type a search query. In some cases this is extended with a category filter and the use of advanced search. Is this user friendly and smart to do or should you incorporate something else?

Well, I think a plain search is not the smart thing to do. Several researches show that about 50% of visitors on a website use the searchbox to find the information they need. So why let them swim with simple terms and not guide them and give them the search scope they need. For instance a shop for pda’s like www.pdashop.nl . The hold several brands in theire catalog but on the starting page for search only show a tiny searchbox. I would advise to put some filters right there with the searchbox. You can think of several filters to put up there:  brand, weight, pricing, engine and some additional attributes pda’s tend to have. These filters should operate on themselves as well, so without a search query in the main searchbox. THis gives the user some additional browse capabilities. Since selling pda’s (in this case) is about everything this shop wants to do, it should focus on the shortest way to get the potential client to the preffered pda.

In the case of public engines Google holds a single searchbox and claim to be able to understand what a user means with that single query and know what context the user holds. This is impossible and as I stated in an earlier post, the use of channels would be a start (information pages, discussion/blogs and forums and shop/auction pages). Google furthermore offers extended search in which you can tell the engine to search in a single website, look for specific file types and such filters. These a quite useless. Most of the time a user doesn’t know which website the information can be found, doesn’t care which  filetype. These filters a typically thought of by techies and should be reconsidered in more usefull terms, more categories, pricing filters (for the shop channel), look for discussion with more than one message in a singel topic. Companies like Google and Microsoft should be able to incorporate this technically and have the resources to do so.

A single searchbox would only be usefull for a site up to 50 pages with nothing but textual information otherwise the immediate use of filters would make a search much faster and more  succesfull.