Search isn't easy 
Research shows that users like search for two reasons: to find the information they're looking for without following the path the site presents them and to find their way back to familiar territory when they're lost. The possibility that a user decides to look for a product or service via the search instead of the navigation increases when the amount of information offered on the site increases. A large site without a search option frustrates users who can't find what they're looking for fast. Search is important.

However much users love to search, most of them aren't very good at it. Research by usability expert Jakob Nielsen shows that only 51% of users is successful at the first search attempt. A pretty low figure, but the worst is yet to come. Half of the users who are unsuccessful at their first attempt, give up the search immediately. Of the other half, only 32% were successful in their second attempt. Of those who ventured a third try, only 18% got satisfying search results. The sad conclusion here is not only that users aren't very good at using the search function but that they don't get better at it after repeated attempts.

There are a lot of reasons why searches don't always bring about the desired results. Two things stand out however. First of all, a lot of people use their own words to look for something and the words they use are often not the ones used on the site. Someone who searches for "invest" on the Citibank site gets a totally different list of results than someone who searches for "investing" or "investment". Secondly, a lot of people don't know the correct spelling of certain words, especially things like movie titles or product names. Someone looking for "Tombraider" on Film.com doesn't get very satisfying results. Only the correctly spelled "Tomb Raider" yields the sought after information.

Help your users 
It's obvious users can use a little help searching your site. Well, you can help them a great deal by keeping search simple. The average user has no idea what Boolean operators are, whatever Paxos may think. Don't bombard users with all kinds of advanced search possibilities either: all the extra tick boxes, dropdowns and links on the Blackwell Publishers site confuse users rather than facilitate their search.

The best way to help users search is to improve your own search mechanism. Relatively small, but very significant changes you can make are showing the user's search query in your feedback message (e.g.: "Your search for "query" found x items") and in the search box itself, like E! Online does. Quite often, a lack of results is due to poor spelling on the user's behalf. When users see their query repeated, chances are that they will recognize their mistake and attempt a second search with a correctly spelled query.

An even better way to avoid bad or no results due to poor spelling is to remedy spelling mistakes yourself, or to suggest alternative ways of spelling, like AltaVista does. Poor souls who search for "web usbility" are kindly asked by AltaVista whether they might mean "web usability" instead. Extremely handy, especially when you're not sure how to spell a certain film title or name.

Quite often users don't find what they're looking for on a site, simply because they use a different word than the site does. A good way to remedy this is to make up a list of synonyms of certain words that you then assign to a particular search query. That way, users can search for "invest", "investment" and "investing" and still get the same results, regardless of the terminology used on the site.

Els Aerts & Karl Gilis

A more in depth version of this article has appeared in Tips & Advies Online Ondernemen, year 5, number 16 (Belgium and the Netherlands).