do-it-yourself site search evaluation
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TRANSCRIPT
Do It Yoursel
f
Site Search Evaluation
The Unbxd Cheat Sheet
Auto-complete
Single word Spellcheck
Double word Spellcheck
Spell correction
Stemming, single vs. Plural
Stemming, tenses
Searching category andsub-category names
Phonetic search
Contextual search
Weighted terms
Spatial searching
Synonym matching
Auto-complete Shorten purchase
cycles
Suggest up-sell, cross-sell products in drop-down box
Encourage searching for specific products, which improves the relevance of search results.
Single Word Spellcheck
Shorten purchase cycles by suggesting corrections.
Reduce chances of a lost sale due to mis-spelled search query.
Improve user experience
Double Word Spellcheck
Enhance user experience for more than one word typed by the visitor.
Stemming: Singular Vs. Plural Results must be the same for
singular and plural queries.
Eg. Run versus Running, when searching for shoes.
Must provide uniform results for both types of queries when visitors think differently.
Extremely important for promotions :- merchandiser may run campaign against run but not running.
Stemming: Tenses Must provide uniform results for past and present
tense queries.
For eg. Stripe T-shirt Vs. Striped T-shirt
Motivated by same reasons, mainly.
i.e. Promotions effectiveness and better user experience.
Category Matching
Visitors search for categories, sub-categories and store names.
These names are not always present in each product or SKU.
Must still display the contents of each category/sub-category or store.
Do you display contents of the exact category or only those products which contain category name in the description?
Category Relevance Visitors search for generic
queries.
There may be multiple stores in which the query matches.
Do you know which store or category is most relevant for the query?
Do you simply display the store/category with most results?
Must show the most relevant category or store first.
Phonetic Spellcheck Visitors make very obvious
spell mistakes.
Phonetic spell check ensures that similar sounding words are more important than other words when correcting a spell-mistake.
Does your search correct “jeens” to “jeans” or something else?
Does your search correct “nokea” to “nokia”?
Contextual Search
Humans think about products in a particular way.
“I want watches less than 5000”
“Are there hotels around airport in Sydney?”
Search must understand the context of the naturally expressed keywords.
Allow visitors to search for attributes like price ranges, brand names, etc.
Weighted Terms Let’s say visitors
search for “brown leather jackets”.
What does your search display if there are no brown leather jackets but there are brown shoes and leather jackets?
Does the search understand that “jackets” is the key term here and not “brown” and “leather”?
Understanding the relative importance of words in a search query is important.
Spatial Search
Visitors on travel sites look for proximity to landmarks.
Search needs to understand distances and proximity.
Can you search for distances from landmarks?
Can you search for travel time from landmarks?
Synonym Matching
Visitors use some words interchangeably.
Cellphones are the same as Mobiles.
Does your search know that it needs to present same results for both searches?
Is there a simple way for you to create more such relationships between words?
These are just a few of the tests
we perform.
Cover Image by philenthropist/Flickr
Stemming image by Cooking For Geeks/Flickr
Gramophone image By Ludmiła Pilecka (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Balance scale by Sepehr Ehsani/Flickr
Radar image by Morning Calm News/Flickr