

Converting Search into Navigation - adnam
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-navigation/

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qznc
I do not get his criticism. If I search Amazon for "pink impact resistant
iphone 5 cover", most of the results should qualify for "a highly protective
yet girlish phone case as a gift for her daughter".

What should this mother have done? How does a "competent searcher" approach
this?

The most important search skill for Google is "The first results are ads! Look
for the slightly yellow background!"

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hexagonc
I agree. The only mistake the user made with the search query: "pink impact
resistant iphone 5 cover", is failing to realize that she probably only needed
to search for "impact resistant iphone 5 cover". Products on this page may
already have an option to choose pink. The fact that Amazon shows a lot of
related products on a page is basically a form of category search, anyway.

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lucb1e
Interesting perspective, "users are incompetent" versus "search technology is
incapable (or badly implemented)".

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digitalmagus
Pretty much my thoughts on this. In my experience of searching for things in
several fortune 500 websites who can afford to implement good search engines,
I end up searching their sites with google... Example search: whatever item
site:microsoft.com ... which 7/10 times quickly finds exactly what I was
looking for.

It's possible however that I tend to find what I want quickly than possibly
some people because my google-fu is better than the average. A couple of my
family members are in fact horrible at searching. They call me on the phone at
least once every 2 weeks, because they can't find somehting on the Internet
that I could find in my first search attempt. One probably because of low IQ
and the other because of poor written English skills, neither of which can be
easily fixed by merely 'learning to search better'.

Lastly, if all search engines functioned mostly the same both in terms of
input method (keywords vs human questions) or syntax requirement (special
commands or characters), then yes, learning to search better could have
significant impact, but I find this is hardly the case.

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lucb1e
> _In my experience of searching for things in several fortune 500 websites
> who can afford to implement good search engines, I end up searching their
> sites with google_

Same experience here. I've been thinking of creating a good search engine that
sites could implement, but I'm not sure how to start on it or what their needs
are exactly.

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Zombieball
I think many good search engines already exist: CloudSearch, Elastic Search,
Lucene, even Google Site Search. Often the difficulty with search is not the
engine but rather deciding what to put in it - what documents? What fields are
searchable? Which fields are facets? What to use as a list for synonyms? How
to handle stemming?How to support multiple languages etc.

Those configurations can make a world of difference in the quality of a user's
search results.

