Last week You Tube announced that they will optionally show you search suggestions as you type. I really like this feature - it helps people formulate queries in an intuitive and familiar way. Most browsers have a similar functionality that will show previous queries you have entered - so people don’t have to learn anything new to use this. 

My main complaint is that it is not on by default. You have to click on the advanced link beside the search box and select the option. So very few people will use it. I’ve also see some suggestions that don’t have any results - they need to make sure this doesn’t happen. However these are minor complaints. I’m sure this is a trend we will see more of.

I came across a new search engine today: RedZee. Apart from the cute but slightly annoying logo the main thing that is different about them is the way they present their search results. I am always interested to see new ways of presenting search results - maybe there is something we use to improve the site search experience for our customers. Unfortunately I didn’t find that at RedZee.

The search experience is something like Apple’s coverflow which is used for browsing through albums. Apple’s coverflow has never pushed my buttons - I’ve always seen it as more of a gimmick. I definitely didn’t like the interface for searching - mainly because you have to use your mouse to scroll through the results. You only see the title and description for the result that is currently at the top. This interface would probably work better for an image search.

There are a few other issues - presumably the most relevant result is the one at the top - is the next most relevant one to the left or the right - which way should I go? It looks like they show the homepage of the site, rather than a shot of the actual page you’ll go to. So in this example for a search for cars the Apple homepage shows featuring the MacBook Air, even though the result is for Apple’s trailer for the movie Cars.

To the RedZee people I say nice try - I think you’re one idea closer to a good one.

Google’s new Search within a Search offering seems to be getting a fair amount of attention, but not necessarily for the right reasons The New York Times piece this week: A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites touches on some issues that should be of concern to retailers. A recent blog by Alan Rimm-Kaufman: Google To Vegetarians: Eat The Damn Hamburger was a little more blunt

In my mind the best outcome from this is that it gets people thinking more about site search. It highlights the difference in the quality of Google’s search within a site compared with the site’s own search. I’m always amazed at how many sites have terrible search (this is why we’re in business). For these sites the new Google offering could be a benefit by making it possible for people to use Google to search their site. Although there are concerns about competitors ads showing on these results. However for those sites that have a good quality site search it will be vastly superior to the Google site restricted search and this feature will not be very useful. In essence, the new Google search-within-a-search takes control away from the retailer (or publisher, or whatever entity’s site is being searchedHere are the drawbacks that I see

1. The Google-provided search results will not have the visual appeal that other quality site search offerings provide – e.g. they don’t include images or other visually appealing elements
2. Because Google doesn’t understand the structure of the data on a company’s site, the search won’t allow for things like merchandising, sorting, refinements or promotional copy
3. Google does not index every page of every site, and they often don’t have recently launched or added products, so a user might use the Google site search feature and be misled into thinking the site doesn’t have the item they seek, when it could just be that Google’s indexer is not up-to-date
4. Relevance of the search results is key – if the user does type a term into the search box, how relevant are the results that come back? They could actually lead the user away from the retailer’s site, and cause the company to miss out on a conversion that their real site search solution would have generated

The other major issue is that it will likely backfire with Google’s advertisers. By increasing their control over users who have done a brand query for ‘Best Buy’ or ‘REI’ and then showing ads for those companies’ competitors on subsequent Google search-within-a-search results pages, Google is now directly competing with their retailing advertisers (and other sites) and diluting the brands of these sites. And, they’re potentially leading the user to a competitor’s site via their ad. In my view, this is not good practice – it doesn’t benefit the user and it certainly doesn’t benefit the retailer.

Ideally Google will allow the site owner to control whether or not this box appears for them. They could do this through the webmaster tools. An even more useful feature would be to allow the site owners to specify the search form - so they could send people to their own site search. It would be interesting to see if Google would allow this - because it would remove the opportunity for them to make revenue from the ads on these pages.

If nothing else, I hope this prompts site owners to look at the quality of their site search - they should make sure its delivering relevant results that are well presented. Whether people search their site through Google or on the site directly, companies need to make sure people have an easy path to finding the items they seek. Usability experts back up what we’ve been saying for years - ‘if they can’t find it, they can’t buy it.’

Wikia Search launched this week to much fanfare. The new community-based search engine from the same people behind Wikipedia intends to shake things up for Google and other major search engines by “democratizing search” – that is, delivering results based on what USERS think is important instead of a mathematical algorithm.

I like the basic concept because it’s similar to our approach - we allow users to influence the relevance of the search results implicitly by watching what they click on and this makes a huge difference to the relevance of site search.

Wikia is searching the web and is very similar to the approach taken by our sister company Eurekster with their Swiki product. The difference is Swikis are focused around particular topics and they combine explicit and implicit voting.

Wikia’s biggest challenge is firstly getting people to contribute to improve the relevance of the results and secondly getting people to use the search. I think, despite all their venture funding and the profile of their founder they will struggle to overcome these challenges.

Chris Sherman was fairly scathing of Wikia in an article on Search Engine Land yesterday: “yet another crappy search service…”. I tend to agree even though I like the basic concept.

In the last few weeks Yahoo has launched Search Suggest and they’re testing an enhanced version of this called Search Assist.

This is part of a growing trend of using AJAX in search. Yahoo’s new tools are really useful - they help you complete your search query as you start typing. Search assist goes a step further by suggesting related terms using some old Alta Vista technology called Prisma. The search suggest technology has been done by others - but it’s nice to see a major search engine offering this feature - I really like it.

Incidentally I think, as well as improving the user experience it could have a positive impact on Yahoo’s revenues from paid search… The suggestions that are shown will be popular queries that they have seen before. This will mean that these will become more popular and there will be less people searching in the tail. The more popular search terms are monetized better than the tail terms because there is more competition for them. Yahoo could give more weight to search terms that have higher bids although this would have to be done carefully to ensure it didn’t negatively impact the user experience.

When I tried this I noticed the search suggest tool is only on the home page, not on the search results page. It would be nice if it was there too.

As an aside I remember talking to Alta Vista about the Prisma technology years ago - before they were acquired by Yahoo. They were considered replacing the Prisma technology with our Related Search technology - but we never quite got a deal worked out.

Technology Evangelist spotted that Yahoo is trying a new search interface at AllTheWeb. I love seeing this type of experimentation and am always looking for new ideas that we might be able to apply to site search. Google has a similar test area at searchmash.com.

The Yahoo experiment has an ajax search box that shows the search results after you complete each word with out having to hit enter. It also shows suggestions below which you can use the arrows to navigate to. Once you navigate to a suggestion the search results appear without you hitting enter. X1 from IdeaLab has some similar concepts for their desktop search (which powers the Yahoo desktop search). The main difference here is X1 does partial matching on a word - so will show you results as soon as you start typing, whereas this interface waits until you’ve typed a word.

I wasn’t overwhelmed by this and I doubt this type of search will be widely used unless it improves significantly. It is difficult to try to change the model of how search works that people have in their head. Currently this is something like - you type words in and press enter - or the search button.

People are used to having previous searches appear below the search box. This has been a feature provided by browsers for years. However Yahoo’s implementation is non-standard because the search appears as soon as you navigate to the suggested search. If you press enter it returns to the previous search you did. This seemed confusing to me. Even though it’s not perfect I think it’s great they’re experimenting and trying out different ideas.