Jakob Nielsen posted an interesting article today about the U.S. Census Bureau’s website. The article was primarily about how fancy formatting doesn’t necessarily help attract users eyes but it also contained some interesting information about site search.
The users were classified into 4 groups based on how their eyes scanned the page. The largest group (57%) was search dominant. This is yet more evidence highlighting the importance of site search.
Further down the article Jakob criticized the site search quoting one user saying “I know where I can probably find it faster: Google”. I took a quick look at their site search – here are a couple of comments:
- The default search only searches their FAQs. This is powered by RightNow, which is a good CRM tool but it doesn’t have a very good search. More importantly a good best practice in site search is to make the default search across all of your content. (See Qantas as an example where we search all of their content including the FAQs hosted by RightNow.)
- The RightNow search does have a link to their full site search which ironically enough is powered by Google. It doesn’t have the features you’d expect in a site search such as facets, related searches, ordering options and it looks like a web search – complete with URLs being displayed with each search result, which in a site search is next to useless.
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Who built that website? Los Alamos lab usually do develop softwares for some US government departments and if this is one of theirs, then it doesn’t seem right that with all the top scientists employed over there, that is the best they could come up with is a crap website.