Jazajay
Active Member
Not sure if this is the best place to post this but most site search functions are TBH crap and always leave you wanting more IMO, Amazon great example if you miss spell what you are looking for.
A proper site search should IMO take you longer to design than the entire site it self due to it being a serious flash point for site visitors leaving your site because they don't think you offer a product or the information just because they typed in something wrong or your site search function is too basic and doesn't take into account relevance and about 100 other factors, this can seriously effect your bounce and conversion rates and can take you longer than learning to code to learn about how to do it properly.
So much so that if you don't offer a search function there is a statistically a much higher chance that the user will stay longer on your site from following categories and find the information manually and there is some good reasons not to offer one even on huge sites as a result.
So very rarely am I impressed when I use one.
But for what I think is a great coded one, even better than mine that I spent days on, check out ~
Buy High Quality Vitamins, Minerals and Herbal Supplements Online | Holland & Barrett - the UK's Leading Health Retailer
Type into the search box Digestive enzymes.
What you get is the digestive aids page, not the same thing and if you coded your site search to look for digestive enzymes it would not come up with digestive aids and then link the category bread crumbs in as well as to a computer programmer that is 2 completely different terms as different as Apple and Zebra.
Again type in Memory and it brings up Ginkgo Biloba products which is again amazing for the term searched for.
Possible done via tags so for example you assign tags to categories and then when they are searched, look up the tags and if it is present link into the category, but that would take a lot of time to get right, miss one and it would impact on sales as in a site that offers great search function returns a zero match you would assume that they didn't offer it, less well done sites you would muggle through if you knew it had several variations. For a site as big as H&B and the amount of tags needed that would be time consuming but probably how it is done, unless anyone else has any other ideas.
Anyway I know it seems basic but I can tell you the coding behind it is probably pretty good.
For example coq10, q10, CoEnzyme Q10 and CoEnzymeQ10 all bring you to the right category which is a really great example, so many sites you have to go through the variations to see which one they have it under, chose wrong and you may think they don't have it when it's in fact under a different term, the fact it flags up all 4 variations to the same page is just amazingly well coded again tags would be the best approach, maybe for term variations like that but that would require each word being seriously thought about before hand.
Anyway well impressed and I have taken some things from it from when I'm next coding a site search function. It's not often that I am seriously impressed with a sites function but this is just amazing from the terms I've used so far, kept me on the site much more than any other health sites I go to, about 2 a month, so thought I would share for others to take ideas from.
One well impressed.
Jaz
A proper site search should IMO take you longer to design than the entire site it self due to it being a serious flash point for site visitors leaving your site because they don't think you offer a product or the information just because they typed in something wrong or your site search function is too basic and doesn't take into account relevance and about 100 other factors, this can seriously effect your bounce and conversion rates and can take you longer than learning to code to learn about how to do it properly.
So much so that if you don't offer a search function there is a statistically a much higher chance that the user will stay longer on your site from following categories and find the information manually and there is some good reasons not to offer one even on huge sites as a result.
So very rarely am I impressed when I use one.
But for what I think is a great coded one, even better than mine that I spent days on, check out ~
Buy High Quality Vitamins, Minerals and Herbal Supplements Online | Holland & Barrett - the UK's Leading Health Retailer
Type into the search box Digestive enzymes.
What you get is the digestive aids page, not the same thing and if you coded your site search to look for digestive enzymes it would not come up with digestive aids and then link the category bread crumbs in as well as to a computer programmer that is 2 completely different terms as different as Apple and Zebra.
Again type in Memory and it brings up Ginkgo Biloba products which is again amazing for the term searched for.
Possible done via tags so for example you assign tags to categories and then when they are searched, look up the tags and if it is present link into the category, but that would take a lot of time to get right, miss one and it would impact on sales as in a site that offers great search function returns a zero match you would assume that they didn't offer it, less well done sites you would muggle through if you knew it had several variations. For a site as big as H&B and the amount of tags needed that would be time consuming but probably how it is done, unless anyone else has any other ideas.
Anyway I know it seems basic but I can tell you the coding behind it is probably pretty good.
For example coq10, q10, CoEnzyme Q10 and CoEnzymeQ10 all bring you to the right category which is a really great example, so many sites you have to go through the variations to see which one they have it under, chose wrong and you may think they don't have it when it's in fact under a different term, the fact it flags up all 4 variations to the same page is just amazingly well coded again tags would be the best approach, maybe for term variations like that but that would require each word being seriously thought about before hand.
Anyway well impressed and I have taken some things from it from when I'm next coding a site search function. It's not often that I am seriously impressed with a sites function but this is just amazing from the terms I've used so far, kept me on the site much more than any other health sites I go to, about 2 a month, so thought I would share for others to take ideas from.
One well impressed.
Jaz