I noticed recently that Amazon has started showing Related Searches on their search page.
I am a big fan of Related Searches. They offer a an easy, unobtrusive way of doing query refinement. This may be refining the query as “harry potter book 7” does in the example above, or offering tangential, but related queries like star wars or lord of the rings. Related Searches are easy to use – you just click on them. They are unobtrusive – they only take up a line or two of text – so you can still see relevant search results above the fold. They are also very popular. We see about 25% of people who search will use the related searches.
I often recommend that people look to see how Amazon are doing things when they are making design decisions because Amazon put so many resources to put into testing so they can get the usability right. Even usability guru Jakob Nielsen defers to them, for example his newsletter today he cited Amazon as a positive example for the easiest way to enter state codes
In this case I take it as a complement that Amazon has finally started offering a feature which we have offered all of our site search customers for years. For example here’s a screen shot showing the related searches for tulips on FTD:
