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

The discussion on wether or not to automatically alter the users search query to one the search engine thinks is correct is subject of a new discussion now that Google seems to be doing this with their “Did you mean” function.

What happens? If you type a query for which Google finds a suggestion, it now shows 2 results for the suggested query at the top of the search results. Below you’ll find the results for the query entered by the user.

Automated correction results by Google

How thoughtfull? I think not, not for a public search engine anyway.

What makes the function ‘Did you mean…’ tick? Well, most probable both present worddata found in all documents indexed by Google and user input combined. Every query is checked with known words and a most common query is build from popular searches similar to the one checked and with more possible results.
Since Google has no limited information domain (it indexes all info found in the world) a particular search, like the one shown in the image above, cannot easily be translated to the one suggested. The subjects are totaly different, only the letter combination is one letter off.

When is it possible to do an automated replacement? Within a website for instance. The information domain on a website is limited and a suggestion comes from information of that website (so don’t use the common API from Google ) and would probably be sensable.

Preferably the user is given an option to save his or hers preffered setting for a next time. An advise to Google: add this as an option to the user preferences!