Conducting the search
Conducting a search does not have to be conceived as a one-shot process that brings back exactly the right result on the first try, Hagen said. It can be more of a dialogue between the site and the visitor, with the visitor's feedback offering a means of narrowing the search.
Indeed, University of California at Berkeley search researcher Marti Hearst said next-generation search will take a step back from search engines and implement search paths based on hyperlinked material. Leading the user from one hyperlink to the next provides the user with a more limited search path, something like boarding a train as opposed to going cross-country in an all-terrain vehicle.
Following described links gets the user more easily to his or her destination, while moving down untracked terrain, Hearst said, "may get you wedged between two boulders on the side of a cliff."
In addition, promising improvements in search technology are just around the corner or already here, waiting to be implemented. While keyword searches are based predominantly on one or two keywords, so-called matching engines are able to take multiple variables and match them up with another set of variables.
Matching engines are particularly useful when trying to pair a job applicant with an employer, said Sean Luitjens, director of strategic technology at recruitment site Monster.com. That ability is important to Monster, which lists 402,828 job postings.
Matching engines can deal with many more factors than keyword search engines, said George Karypis, computer science professor at the University of Minnesota. They can also outperform collaborative filtering engines, which use another technology to classify individuals. Matching engines still under development at Burning Glass Technologies and iXmatch are likely to bring a new level of search to sites in the near future, Karypis said.
In addition, search engines based on eXtensible Markup Language are appearing. These make use of the flexible tags on XML documents and can better describe the contents of those documents in search results, according to representatives of two such engines: XYZFind, an XML search engine backed by BEA Systems, and Xdex from Sequoia Software.
However, the biggest improvement won't come until Web operators critically review their own sites to see if the search functions are working, something they often fail to do, according to Forrester's Hagen. Effective search on a site enables customers to serve themselves, which "costs 30 times less than phone calls and 10 times less than e-mails," Hagen said.
Yet at 68 percent of the sites tested by Forrester, fewer than half of the results had anything to do with the query, and nearly two-thirds of the sites failed to list the best results on the first page.
Search has always been part of the Webvan site, but ease of search and obtaining quick, relevant results "is critical," Brougher said.
"The foundation of our business is saving the customer time. Think of the customer walking up and down the aisles of a supermarket looking for something," vs. finding it in seconds at the Webvan site, he said. If the search is lengthy, Webvan's justification for being in business goes away, he said.
