The relevance of search
For the sites of companies and organizations, one of the most important factors in deciding the relevance of a search is not the type of search engine used but how well the content behind a site has been tagged and labeled, Hagen said. Although many businesses are generating content at a prodigious rate, they could employ content management systems from Autonomy, Allaire, Mindwave Software or Semio to make certain their content puts its best foot forward to a search engine.
One department of a company may aggressively tag its pages; another might neglect to tag them at all or use the same tag over and over again for a set of pages. "The tagged content rises to the top of the search results, even if it is not the best fit for the query," Hagen said. Tags used over and over show up as duplicates in the results, leaving the user baffled as to what content lies behind them.
All documents made available to a site's search tool should have different titles and descriptions that an average user can recognize, Hagen said. "Unfortunately, rewriting those portions of the content requires a manual effort," he said. If a firm can't make that investment in its site, Hagen said, it should simply remove untitled and undescribed documents from its index, since they only clutter up user results.
Although few sites practice it, one of the best ways to present relevant results to end users is to categorize them. That's one of the specialties of search engine Northern Light. Instead of just a stack of results extending 20 or 30 pages deep, Northern Light also brings back a set of labeled folders with different results in each. Thus a search for "red beans and rice" brought back both a burrito recipe folder and a rhythm and blues folder, for the Monterey, Calif., band of the same name.
Webvan Group, the online grocery retailer, is about to implement both a keyword and a category search on its site because it was missing sales due to ineffective searches.
In one case, a customer attempting to buy Murphy's Oil Soap, a wood cleaner, couldn't find it without knowing its correct name. Searching on soap or oil won't yield the product, but, by the end of November, searching "wood cleaner" will find it, according to Bill Brougher, director of technical alliances at the Foster City, Calif., company.
Webvan is adding the Mercado Software search engine, IntuiFind, to its site in November. Like EasyAsk's and a handful of other search engines, IntuiFind can search databases of structured information as well as unstructured text, providing a cross-search of two or more types of sources - text content and databases.
"We recently put in categories of food on our site, even though we already carried the products," Brougher said. A customer may find a Japanese noodle she wants more directly by searching in the "Japanese" food category, with its underlying database, than by a general search on "noodle," he said.
Likewise, if you go to Blockbuster.com and search "Belushi" with "frat," you will come up with the name of the movie, Animal House, even though minimal or misleading keywords have been provided to the search engine. "Belushi" shows up in the Blockbuster actors database, and "fraternity" shows up in a file that describes Belushi movies; both are linked to Animal House, said Yaron Dycian, product marketing director at Mercado.
On the other hand, categorization that does not work is particularly frustrating, Forrester's Hagen said.
Searching for "sleeping bags" on Backcountry Gear's site yields no sleeping bags, even though sleeping bags is one of the categories listed under Our Gear Shops at the top of the site, he said.
