Website search illogical

aalwees

aalwees

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Q: Why is search on most sites so dom and frustrating to use?! Like, you search for "electric toothbrush" and it gives you "no results for ""electric toothbrush""". So you assume, as you must, that it's searching for the phrase "electric toothbrush" even though you haven't used the quotes convention. On that assumption, you enter your search without quotes. The results of that, it tells you, are for "electric toothbrush". Yay!! But then you look at the results and it's bloodywell everything electric and everything toothbrush.
Aaargh! It seems like only Takealot has finally fixed this issue, but the rest ... what is wrong with you website designers?!

In the end I resort to using Google to search the site. But even Google gives you results polluted with crap outside your phrase. I once checked the source code of some of Googe's results and many of the pages did not even have my search term hidden there.
 
It's not a website design issue, it is a search tool issue.

Search is difficult.

Full text search on a database field is not intelligent, it's just matching tokens.

Proper search needs a proper search engine, like elastic search, lucene, algolia, etc


However, I cannot say this is a general issue that I actually encounter much at all
 
I'd have thought an item on a shopping site would be key-worded, including phrases, and that a search went through that. But I can see why thorough key-wording might be too labour intensive for a big site.
At the very least, the quotes convention should be respected without that stupid contradiction.
 
IMO the problem is two-fold.

First, developing a website and developing what essentially amounts to a proper search engine are two rather different jobs. Building a proper search feature requires understanding of basic principles, such as query filtering and sanitation; result weighing and structuring the underlying mechanism to match the structure of the website (usually an eCommerce site). This can be complex. For example, searching for "hats" should not also bring up any item labeled "hat" but also something like "baseball cap" or "fedora". The latter requires additional details in the products database so that the search feature will "know" that a baseball cap must be included in a search for hats. However, searching for "golf shoes" should not bring up results like "baby shoes", but at the same time you don't want to cause a typo in a "sorry we don't stock that item" sort of response. And then there are things like ordering results by popularity, price and what not. The cost of proper search feature development, if done for a bespoke website, can easy equal the cost for the rest of the website.

Secondly, online retailers don't seem to mind if you get a ton of mismatched results. They often view it as an up-selling opportunity. As long as you get as many of their other products shoved in your face, they're happy. They do not that presenting random products on their homepage usually results in increased sale of those items, and they view a search feature similarly.

// F
 
It's kind of on purpose so that there's a chance you fill your baskets with those random results as an impulse buy
 
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