On the internet, no one knows you're a dog. Except maybe the big outdoor store REI.
A search for hiking boots on the retailer's Web site yielded 84 selections. Top on the list: Ruff Wear Bark 'N Boots, $34, booties for dogs.
Why would the search engine on REI's site offer mutt booties to a serious boot buyer? David Harris, vice president of marketing at EasyAsk, which makes search engines for e-commerce catalogs, thought it was likely a result of REI's knack for presenting outdoor wear in an appealing manner.
"Somewhere on the site its content says, 'When you're out hiking with your dog, it's great to wear these boots,' " he speculated. The search engine indexing mechanism didn't try to distinguish what was more important - the hiking footwear or the dog. Hence, dog booties were its first selection.
REI is not alone. As Interactive Week staffers turned their attention to how search is implemented, they found many examples of poor results.
Suspicious of the unshaven character eyeing your new BMW? A check for the "10 most wanted" criminals at the Federal Bureau of Investigation Web site will tell you about the apprehension of a burglar in Lee County, Fla., one of the 10 most wanted in that locale. But that's the only reference to wanted criminals on the first page.
At www.whitehouse.gov, a query of "Whitehouse" brings up the President's Council on Sustainable Development and the Office of Management and Budget, links one might expect from a heavy-hitting government site. But changing the keyword to "White House" produced an application for White House internships. Maybe that's what the president wanted. But it's more likely another example of what makes Internet users ask the real question: "Must search stink?"
That's the title of a recent report by Paul Hagen, a senior analyst at the Cambridge, Mass., market research firm Forrester Research. Hagen and others said search doesn't have to stink. Nevertheless, it often does. And - despite new technology, or even properly implemented existing technology that can eliminate many of the more onerous problems - it likely will for the foreseeable future.
For the Forrester survey, a staffer typed "HTML" into the IBM site search engine and got back all the pages where content coders had forgotten to close the initial HTML bracket.
A search for "buy" at Lucent Technologies' site took a visitor into the company's human resource documents that told employees how to buy extra vacation days, complete with links to executive compensation policies, according to Must Search Stink?
In the Interactive Week review, reporters looking for problems said they didn't have to go any further than the magazine's own site on ZDnet, powered by respected search engine Thunderstone. In some cases, the search function had clearly been "dumbed down" to produce lots of results for unskilled surfers, a common problem with search on the Web, experts said. The REI search engine came up with the dog booties because "it is designed to capture everything relevant," said Jennifer Lind, an REI spokeswoman.
At Office Depot's online store, trying the vague keyword "tapes" or the potentially confusing "3 ring binder" produced good results. But searching for Quick Books yielded only references to business and computer books - not to QuickBooks, the popular small-business accounting software package sold by Office Depot.
