Qweery's look at the world of search

A lot of website use forms of attribute search to help their users find the information faster. Examples are categories, price ranges, supplies, brands etc.
Formerly, the most common way to let searchers use these attributes was with drop-down selectboxes. The last year you see the faceted search type more and more. I believe the power lies in multi faceted search. What’s that? Let me explain:

Faceted search works kinda like this: a users types in a searchquery and the website shows the result engine result page (SERP). Next to this resultset, the engine shows all possible attribute values (grouped) with the count of available results shown in brackets:

By clicking on one of the atrtibute values, the searcher quickly narrows its search….quickly is the general idea…however, it can result in a endless clicking exercise. Let say you are looking for clothing for your baby and the webshop search offers faceted search. You type in ’shirt’ and it shows you about 5.000 results. The atribute filter contain size. Thank god, this should speed up things. What size does she have now…hmmm..62, 68…Let me try 62 first. The resultset is filtered and no options for sizes are shown anymore. 10 pages and 6 filter options later: nothing. Ok. Let’s click back to my original ’shirt’ query and try size 68….you get the drift.

Another way, not faceted, is to let users select more than one value of a single filter with multiple select or checkboxes to be able to select size 62 AND 68 together. I don’t come across this way of searching much, but I think it is a lot better than being able to select a single value. Main issue with this kind of search (which I have seen) is that they don’t show the number of expected result by selecting one of more values.

We are now working on multiple faceted search as a standard option within the QweeryBox. We already offer multiple selection and faceted search a separate filter options but in our next release we will have combined these two and enable an even better search experience. When will you see this in public? At the end of july we expect to launch the new version of boezoe.nl, bases upon the latest version of the QweeryBox and it will have multiple faceted search!

Happy searching,

Maarten Rooseboom

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.