Jack Vinson's blog post "Search Should Work Like Magic" made me think about something I often find frustrating and time consuming. I think one of the hardest things about search is that we all think differently, so what we type in -- even if we're looking for the same article -- may be very different from what someone else would type in.
Most Searches require that the actual words are used in the title, description or text body of the article. I think more effective is the ability to create a Keyword Taxonomy for your Web site that uses phrases and key words that your online audience is most likely to use.
For example: What if you could create a keyword list that accepted words or pharases of up to 50 characters? Then the various authors of your Web content can select which of them to connect to that content for search result purposes.
The point is not only to ease their frustration, but to have them spend their time at your Web site with the information they need, not wrestling with search or clicking aimlessly in search of information.
Let's say that you write an article on multi-tasking and your colleague writes one on organizational skills. Each author might think of different keywords to use to reference that content. But, if they had a prescribed list of keywords and phrases to select from, they would probably end up selecting some of the same ones. This would increase the probablility that more relevant resources would be returned to the user, without them having the frustrating job of typing in useless search terms that return things they aren't interested in, or, even worse, that dreaded "Your search has returned Zero results" page that we all see more than we should.
Searching for information is time consuming, irritating and lots of times not really helpful. Quite often I've done what I think is exhaustive searching only to learn I missed an article that might have been key in my research about a product my company was thinking of using.
This simple technique will help you up the odds of your Web site's visitors being able to find what they need quickly. Which is the important thing you can control. And, it may also help your classifications on the way Google, MSN, Yahoo and the others categorize your content. The trick is that your advanced search page allows users to select by the keyword phrases you have designated to display, instead of being faced with only a Boolean search form that requires they find their crystal ball to guess what wording your content developers used that might result in a relevant search.
Oh, and I know this because it's part of the platform that my company sells.
How are you increasing the odds that your customers, prospects, partners and staff can find the information they need easily?
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