Search and you shall find – 6 tips for better search

Having a search function is a hygiene factor on the web. It can be used both to navigate the site and to search for information and content. Many visitors benefit greatly from the search function. It is also important from an accessibility perspective. For example, studies show that visitors with special needs are more likely to use the search function to navigate than other visitors.

Bullets and asterisks

It is important that the results of a search are relevant and presented in an accessible way. External search engines such as Google have set the standard for how the search function should work. For those of us who were introduced to the world of the internet and search engines in the 1990s, part of our computer education was learning how to search the internet. We trawled through different ways of writing search phrases. Single quotes, double quotes, asterisks, brackets. With a bit of luck, the result was the beloved boy band or a cute cat.

Today, the complexity of search queries has moved under the skin. We, as the owners of the content on the website, are expected to account for the 'brackets and asterisks'. What constitutes a good search result and what the visitor expects from the function varies – depending on their incentives, role and previous knowledge of the subject.

6 concrete tips for a better internal search function

1. Think like the visitor
   Step outside the "shop" and peek in through the shop window as if it were your first visit to the site. Is it easy to find the search function? Is it easy to perform a search? Are the search results presented visually clear? How easy is it to perform a new search if the first one did not produce the desired results? Does the visitor get help with their search query in the form of keyword suggestions and wildcard searches External link.?
2. Title and words
   To get good and relevant search results, content must be well thought out and relevant. There are no shortcuts. Headlines should be short, concise and correspond to the content of the page. Words that the visitor is expected to search for should be in the text. Are the heading levels in the right order?
3. The search function requires work and patience
   Rome wasn't built in a day and the same goes for the internal search function. Search results need to be continuously maintained. Has the content of the website changed? Has the search behavior of visitors changed? What are the search statistics for the website? Has the mission of the organisation changed so that new things should be given higher priority than before?
4. Kill your darlings
   Don't be afraid to exclude search results from the search function. The content of the website should be kept up to date, and so should the search results. Is a four-year-old school lunch menu worth the attention it gets? Should all the images in the image archive, including for example "2014_notes.pdf", really appear in the search results? Should PDF documents appear in the search results? Should the website have a separate search function for images, for example?
5. Don't sort, prioritise
   It can be tempting to sort the search results so that the most recent information is always at the top. But what if the most relevant information on the topic was published two years ago, but is pushed down by 23 irrelevant results where the keyword is mentioned in passing, because of a sort? Can we instead prioritise single pages or articles depending on a specific scenario?
6. Everything is relative
   Search results are based on ranking scores calculated using an algorithm. For most of us, this is quite advanced math. What's a bit easier to grasp, however, is that ranking scores are always relative to each other. You can see it as a prize pallet where only one search result can be winner, second, third... Therefore, saying that all the pages in a search result are "most important" does not make any difference.