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Locator: NIE Home / Publications / Enterprise Search Newsletter / Issue 7 / Article 1
Top 10 Tips for Better Search Results
1: Resist ClutterWe blame some of the early Internet portals for staring this trend. "If one column of content is good, the 4 or 5 must be great!"With today's enterprise engines brimming with gee-whiz features, there's a temptation to turn them all on: resist! Think "Zen rock garden", not "dot-com garage sale."
Interestingly, we've seen sites with 3 column results lists (site navigation, main results, and a right column of text ads) that were clean: there was adequate white space and effective use of color to clearly demarcate items. 2: Use Icons and Graphics Where AppropriateThis does NOT apply to all sites. But, if your site search returns lists of specific products or other tangible items, perhaps even people, then we strongly suggest putting a small picture of the items in the results list.A results list with tangible pictures is light years ahead of a results list without them. And if you have a competitor that shows icons in the results, and you don't, will certainly lose business to them. Pictures speak volumes and covey immense amounts of information that text cannot match. If your site search is more document / information centric, then graphics are probably not applicable. For information centric sites, we have heard of folks trying to put a tiny thumbnail view of each page in the results list. We think this is an interesting idea, though we've not used it personally nor talked to any clients who have, so it's hard to gauge the effectiveness. A thumbnail might convey overall page content; seeing it might give the context of whether it was a news article, or mostly text, or a report with tables, etc. It might also help a user skip pages with ton of hyperlinks that tend to spuriously match lots of searches. On the other hand, showing a tiny picture of the 2002 sales forecast versus a tiny picture of the 2003 sales forecast may not be as helpful. 3: Offer Both Native and HTML Views of Binary DocumentsIf your site contains more than HTML documents--such as PDF, Microsoft Word, Power Point, etc--offer your visitors a choice: view the native document with a specialized viewer or view the document converted to HTML.
4: Make it Easy to Refine Searches
Some search engine vendors don't advertise this capability, but it's often still possible if the engine supports scripting. The idea is to keep taking the previous search and using it as a filter, along with the new search terms. If the search engine doesn't support "filters", then the previous search can be AND'ed in with the new search terms. Offering only one form, perhaps overly complicated 5: Searching for Nothing is Common: Add "Null Search" Page(s)Our work with search analytics has taught us what may seem like an odd fact: site visitors frequently click the search box without entering any search terms--they leave the input box blank. Some search engines don't allow this and bring back an error page, if this is true for yours then consider putting up a different page instead.Why do people do this? More traditional enterprise search engines did allow null searches. If a null search was issued, the most recent documents known to the system were returned. This would effectively show "what's new" on the site. This was particularly useful if the user also selected a subsection of the site, such as FAQ's; they would see the newest FAQ's that had been added. Fixes:
Other times null searches can be generated by web crawling indexers (also known as spiders). If this is happening, try filtering them out of your search analytics via the user-agent field or by IP address, or perhaps try adding an appropriate entry to your site's robots.txt 6: Finding Nothing is also Common: add a "Zero Results" PageIf a user enters a search that doesn't match any documents, you should ensure that a helpful response is displayed. The type of helpful guidance that you offer can depend on whether this is a public or Intranet site.Examples of helpful zero results information:
7: Explain Your Search Syntax, It's Not ObviousThe syntax of a search query, and therefore its meaning, are obvious to you at first glance, you work with it all of the time: you just type in what you're looking for and get what you want. Unfortunately, search engines vary widely in how they interpret search terms, especially if more than one word is entered.For example, if two words are typed in, with just a single space to separate them, will your search engine: (a) look for documents with either word, (b) look for documents that must have both words, or (c) do an exact phrase search (both words in that exact order, with no words in between). And does your search engine understand the Internet style +/- prefixes to words, or does it prefer the older style "and" and "or" keywords; if it expects "and" and "or", do they need to be in upper case? Add a small reminder message either under the search box or in a shaded box at the top or side of the page. Include a help link for more detailed information and examples. Examples of hints you might give (depending on your search engine):
8: If Your Document Dates are Always Recent, Check Them AgainAs we discussed in "Dated Material: The Sad State of Dates" many search engines have and display complete erroneous dates for the documents they retrieve. This is usually caused by the incorrect use the last-modified date of the HTTP header sent out by many web servers.Check that the dates displayed in your results list are correct: if all of the documents show a very recent date, such as today, or this week, or the last time you indexed your site, they are probably wrong (or you have just started writing things down in your organization). Fixes:
9: Omit or Truncate the Display of Long URLs in the Search ResultsMany results lists show the actual URL of the document, perhaps in a smaller font. If these URLs are too long, they can push the right edge of the table off the screen.Fixes:
10: Let Your Users Decide What's RelevantYour search engine typically has a poor idea of what's relevant to a user's search, and attempting to disguise its ignorance with "relevancy bars" and the like is a waste of time and screen real estate.You've seen then, the partially filled in green or blue bars in the left column of the results; maybe they are shaded to look 3D, or perhaps they have little green lights or stars to indicate "relevance". Not to offend those of you who still like them, but these went out of fashion long before the last millennium came to an end, yet some vendors still ship their default templates with these things turned on. Such a cool idea, what went wrong? Some people thought they looked sexy, others silly, while still others worried about the valuable horizontal screen real estate these things used up. Our main problem with them is that they were often so misleading (or just wrong) that they are more annoying than not displaying anything. For example: you do a search where the first screen of results is obviously junk, but the search engine assigns them all 5 stars. Or worse, all of the documents come back with exactly the same 3 star score. Your users know whether a document is relevant or not, regardless of what your search engine thinks. Fixes:
If you'd like to see more articles about this topic please drop us a note, we've love to hear from you. Tell us about your experiences. We also periodically publish guest author articles if you have something really compelling to tell the enterprise search world. Return to the Table of Contents |