My Search Sucks!
by scott — filed in Behavioral, Contextual, Search, Social Search on Oct.13, 2009
“My Search Sucks!” — we hear this from prospects more than any other complaint. Coming from consumer search experiences on the web with the likes of Google, Yahoo, and new entrant Bing, these frustrated employees wonder why they can’t get better search results on their company’s website and intranet. Fair question. Turns out there are a few key principles that explain why site search often sucks and how to fix it:
1. The critical information is not in the document
While documents — whether webpages, pdfs, or Word docs — seem like the best place to discover a match to a user’s search term, they’re not. Processing documents is a good start, but the words within a document do not necessarily match the way a user understands the topic and phrases their question. And even if the search term is in there, it doesn’t mean that particular document is useful. The critical information is in the heads of users, not the documents. The key is to understand how, when, and why people use each document. At Baynote, we call this UseRank.
2. Actions speak louder than words
To get information from users you might think the best approach is to ask them. Seems simple and straightforward, right? Wrong. Turns out that there are a number of problems with explicit means of collecting information stemming from who participates, when, and why. As social science has taught us all along, if you really want to understand people, watch what they do, not what they say.
3. Search does not exist in a vacuum
Any time someone comes to your website, they are looking for something and they give you clues to what that is through both their search and navigation behaviors — and not just what they ask for and where they go, but what they do when they get there. Often they got to your site through an external link such as a search on the web — that’s your first clue. Although the goal might be to solve the site search problem, observing search behavior alone is not enough.
I’ll expand on each of these in more detail in upcoming posts.
October 13th, 2009 on 10:46 am
Scott, I couldn’t agree more with your points; precisely why we encourage our clients to use Baynote rather than allocate dollars toward attempts to custom-build solutions to address relevancy. My search clients tell me their end users are furious their search experiences aren’t bringing the right documents to the top. Just an example of your #1, one client told me they re-branded one of their products, but their field agents continued to search for the product by the old name which was nowhere in the newly published documents. This took months to discover as a problem, and their end users experience countless similar examples that are never discovered, even if someone were assigned to manually find and fix such search problems. Funny thing is that same client also experienced #2 when they rolled their own (expensive custom-developed) document ratings system, then pulled it after a year because users were gaming the ratings. And as far as #3, I’ve found organizations struggle enough to deal with search on its own — I think it’s overwhelming for them to imagine the work it would require to have site search results influenced by other factors such as browsing and organic search terms.
I’ll add a #4 to your list: “Users’ Needs Vary Over Time”. As much as I educate my clients about how they can fine-tune their search engine with lots of custom relevancy rules, realistically no manual process can economically keep up with the ebb and flow of fickle user interests. I love the AT&T example where one day a search for “insight” might mean understanding or clarification, suddenly LG’s hot “Incite” phone has users excited but unaware they’re misspelling the product name, luckily Baynote’s Social Search figured out that when users search for “insight” they’re currently looking for LG’s hot new phone.