

The Current State of E-Commerce Search - Brandork
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/18/the-current-state-of-e-commerce-search/

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Brandork
This is great. Hats off to the Author, and to the Design and User-Experience
Community for putting this kind of information together. As a Developer
though, I'm left with a bit of anxiety after reading this.

I think that part of the reason the top 50 E-Commerce sites haven't
implemented these features is due to the fact that their impact may not have
been demonstrated enough, and articles like this will certainly help address
that and bring more attention towards solving them.

The other part of the reason is that these behaviors are difficult to build
(IMHO). I admittedly haven't done much research on how to implement complex
search features like these, but I bet that the amount of information regarding
best practice or established patterns for these search types is lacking.
Without that information, the skill level required to design them is
relatively high.

I'd love to implement these features in my apps, I feel the frustration of the
users. But what I'd love to see now is an article or blog post in response to
this that pairs each issue or desired behavior with a pattern or solution.

Making the problem visible is taken care of now, but the development community
needs to come up with and/or share the solutions.

~~~
mtdewcmu
I would love trying to fix these search problems. The first step would be to
make sure you're using decent search software, like SOLR, rather than
something constructed ad hoc from the database. That's easy. The next step
would be exploring the options the search software provides and coming up with
a schema that makes the most of its capabilities. I think a lot of sites go
off track at this point, because they don't take the time to customize the
search and they let the potential go to waste.

As a consumer, I've all but written off site search engines, and I use Google
or bing to search their sites when I really want to find something.

