Tag: search

Don’t let bad onsite search catch you by surprise – fix it now.

The biggest challenge in corporate IT is managing the never-ending list of equally important priorities. This requires what I’ve always referred to as “ruthless prioritization”; yes there are a lot of important things to do but you can only work on the most critical. More often than not, important stuff like site search gets left behind.

So what do you do when that important stuff all of a sudden becomes critical? You sweat and you work the problem. It’s easier if you have the right data.

If you’re working to improve your site search it’s sometimes difficult to know what’s working and what’s not. You do a bunch of stuff — modify settings, change the user experience — and measure the outcome. If search success is better, then you pat yourself on the back. Your search improvement efforts worked! But did they? Search is really dynamic. If nothing else changes, you know that the content changes constantly. So was it a content change that improved your search success or something you did to the engine? Fortunately, you can take a lesson from marketing to assess the effect of changes. You can A/B test your search engine.