Latest Articles

The Community Glue

Penny Power, Founder of Ecademy, looks at Community Managers and what they can do to help their Social network survive.

More Everything - The Ofcom 2008 Report

UK consumers are spending more time on communications than ever before but paying less for the privilege, according to UK telecoms watchdog, Ofcom.

Parents Fear For Networked Kids

Internet experts have called on social network sites to do more to protect children as a survey reveals that three-quarters (72 per cent) of parents spy on their children.

• Brief Encounter: Richard Mower, PocketSurfer
• Approaching the Crossover
• The Cleverest Thing That Never Existed
• Book Review: Bringing Nothing to the Party
• Marketers Cautious Over Social Media Spend
• Brief encounter: Steve Pammenter, MD, WhiteLabelDating.com
• Business Sites Handicapping SEO

Related Articles

• The Cleverest Thing That Never Existed

  Semantic search is poorly understood and leading to claims for its powers that lie beyond the bounds of what computers are able to do, says Charlie Hull, MD of Lemur Consulting.

  more

• Business Sites Handicapping SEO

  Businesses are alienating a large section of the online market by failing to optimise their sites for disabled Web users. more

• Window of Opportunity for Microsoft and Facebook

  Microsoft’s continued pursuit of Google has taken a positive step, following the announcement that the Redmond-based company will provide the search tools for Facebook’s 90 million users. more

• MIcrosoft Buys into Semantic Search

  While the definition of Web 2.0 has been argued between digital specialists for some time now, the same key themes prevail. According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 technology enhances "creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users". The definition of Web 3.0 however is much more difficult to define. more

• Money Saving Pay-per-Click Tips

  If you’re feeling the pinch and considering cutting back on your pay per click budget, it is possible to shave inches off your current wasted spend without sacrificing your search engine presence completely. Rebecca Appleton of Top Position explains how to make your existing budget a trimmer, leaner prospect with these money saving tips… more

Related Events

Improving your Business through Effective Search

When: July 12th, 2007
Location: Central London TBC
Price: £50.00 Reduced to £30.00 if you are eligible for a discount.

more



---

New Directions In Search (NMK)

When: September 8th, 2005
Location: Adam Street, 9 Adam Street, The Strand, London WC2N 6AA
Price: £60.00 Reduced to £40.00 if you are eligible for a discount.

more



---

New Directions In Search (NMK)

When: June 23rd, 2005
Location: 01zero-one, Peter Street, Soho, London W1F 0HS.
Price: £60.00 Reduced to £40.00 if you are eligible for a discount.

more



---

New Directions In Search (NMK)

When: May 26th, 2005
Location: 01zero-one, Peter Street, Soho, London W1F 0HS.
Price: £60.00 Reduced to £40.00 if you are eligible for a discount.

more



---

Advanced PPC Search Marketing

When: May 11th, 2005
Location: 76 Portland Place, London W1B 1NT
Price: £295.00 Reduced to £245.00 if you are eligible for a discount.

more



---

Advertisement

Improve your site search

Bookmark this article with: Delicious Digg StumbleUpon

Site search engines should always allow for common user errors. By taking these errors into account, users should be able to always find what they're looking for through the site search.

Making sure that your search engine makes it as easy as possible for your customers to find what they are looking for is business-critical. It is also very difficult - good search engines can cost an awful lot of money and require a lot of ongoing effort to keep them up to scratch.

As an example: on Monday 12th December 2005, I wanted to buy a copy of Jamie Oliver's new cook book Jamie's Italy from amazon.co.uk. So, I went to the “Books” section of their website and searched for “olivers italy” and these 9 items appeared on the results page:

1. “The American Tractor” by Patrick W. Ertel
2. “A Garden in Lucca: Finding Paradise in Tuscany” by Paul Gervais
3. “History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans” by Pamela Ballinger
4. “Oliver Tractors” by Jeff Hackett, Mike Schaefer
5. “Wyoming (Moon Handbooks S.)” by Don Pitcher
6. “Wines of Australia (Mitchell Beazley Wine Guides)” by James Halliday
7. “All Music Guide to Jazz: The Definitive Guide to Jazz Music” by Ron Wynn (Editor), et al.
8. “Larousse Gastronomique: The World's Greatest Cookery Encyclopedia” by Prosper Montagne
9. “The Teacher's Calendar: The Day-By-Day Directory to Holidays, Historical Events, Birthdays and Special Days, Weeks and Months (Teacher's Calendar: The Day-By-Day Directory to Holidays, Historic Events, Birthdays & Special Days)” by Holly McGuire (Compiler), et al.

Jamie Oliver's book didn't appear anywhere on the results page, even though it had been Amazon's 3rd best-selling book in the previous 24 hours.

The problem was that I had typed “olivers italy”, instead of “oliver's italy” (which would have returned Jamie Oliver's at the top of the search results list). That single missing apostrophe was all that it took for Amazon's expensive search engine to splutter, fall over and fail.

So - if Amazon can't do it, it must be impossible, right?

Wrong - here are some things the boys & girls at Amazon could - and should - have thought about.

Two types of problems

There are two basic types of problems that a user can experience when they are searching for something:

1. User-error - the correct search term is entered incorrectly (i.e. the user intends to enter a search term that would cause the search engine to return results that are relevant to their needs, but they enter it incorrectly).
2. Search engine error - the wrong search term is entered (i.e. the user enters a search term that the search engine does not relate to their needs).

User error

People generally enter the correct search term incorrectly because they either:

• Don't know how to spell it.
• Have made a typing error

It's important to realise that there are millions of potential customers who can't spell very well. For example, a 2003 survey of the literacy (i.e. reading and writing) estimated that there were 16% of English adults (aged 16 to 65-year-olds) had literacy levels no higher than those expected of an 11 year-old (source: The Skills for Life Survey).

Also, let's not forget that according to the British Dyslexia Association around 4% of the population are severely dyslexic and a further 6% have mild to moderate dyslexia problems.

This means that your search engine has to account for people making basic knowledge-based spelling mistakes.

Your search engine should also account for people who know how to spell what they are looking for, but make typing errors. The main categories of typing error are:

• Characters close to one another on the keyboard being entered erroneously (either in place of - or in addition to - the correct letter). For example: wrong/wring ; for/dfor.
• Characters being omitted. For example: missing/missng ; oliver's/olivers.
• Characters being entered too many times. For example: impossible/imposssible.
• Characters being entered in the wrong order. For example: disaply/display ; being/ebing.

Your search engine should allow people to make these mistakes and still return useful and relevant results.

Even though we have named these types of issues ‘User error’, if your search engine fails to return information that that the user is looking for it is, of course, your fault and not theirs!

Search engine error

When people enter the wrong term into a search engine, it is only wrong because you have not anticipated it. You should aim to cover as many bases and anticipate as many different search terms as possible.

What to do

The next steps for making your search engine perform better are really simple:

1. Sit down and make a list of all the spelling errors, typing errors and alternative search terms that you think could possibly be relevant to your site (e.g. actually look at your keyboard and think about what letters are close to one another).
2. Ask other people in your organisation to make similar lists.
3. Do some research into what search terms people are using on your site (e.g. interviews, questionnaires, check your search engine logs, etc.)
4. Apply everything you learn to your search engine.

And that's it.

You now have the knowledge you need to begin improving your site's search engine.

Other thoughts

• Improvements in word processing software have made people lazy typists. Software that auto-corrects many spelling and typing errors means that people are no longer forced to review and correct their work to the same extent as in the past. This means that many people are getting out of the habit of precise spelling/typing. So, when they move out of an auto-correcting environment (and onto a website, for example) they are more likely to make - and less likely to notice/correct - mistakes!
• Search results pages should display the search term the user entered in large text (e.g. 28pt). This would help people spot any inadvertent errors.Results pages should also provide the telephone numbers for customer enquiries/assistance.

This article was written by Tim Fidgeon, Head of Usability at Webcredible. He's crazy about usability and runs Webcredible's web usability training and writing for the web training.