6.1. Searching and Your Web Site
The
preceding three chapters were intended to help you create the best
browsing system possible for your web site. This chapter describes
when to use a search engine with your site and demonstrates
techniques that will make searching work best for it.
Throughout this chapter, we use examples of searching systems from
major sites which allow you to search the entire Web, as well as
site-specific search engines. Although these Web-wide tools are
different in that they index a much broader collection of content
than your search system will, it is nonetheless very useful to study
them. Of all searching systems, none has undergone the testing,
usage, and investment that Web-wide search tools have, so why not
benefit from their research?
6.1.1. When Not To Make Your Site Searchable
Before we delve into
searching systems, we need to make a point: think twice before you
make your site searchable.
What? What's the point of having a web site if people
can't find information in it?
Your
site should of course support the finding of its
information. But don't assume a search engine alone will
satisfy all users' information needs.
While many users want to search a site, some just want to browse it.
Also, does your site have enough content to merit the use of a search
engine? How much is enough? It's hard to say. It could be five
resources or fifty; no specific number serves as a threshold. Perhaps
a site with five long, dense documents deserves a search engine more
than one with a collection of twenty brief, well-labeled documents.
In any case, you'll want to balance the time necessary to set
up and maintain a searching system with the payoff it brings to your
site's users.
Because many site developers see search engines as
the solution to the problems that users are
experiencing when trying to find information in their sites, search
engines become bandages for sites with poorly designed
browsing systems. If you see yourself falling
into this trap, you should probably suspend implementing your
searching system until you fix your browsing system's problems.
Search engines are fairly easy to get up and running, but like much
of the Web, they are difficult to set up effectively. As a user of
the Web, you've certainly seen incomprehensible search
interfaces, and we're sure that your queries have retrieved
some pretty strange results. This often is the result of a lack of
planning by the site developer, who probably installed the search
engine with its default settings, pointed it at his or her site, and
forgot about it. So, if you don't plan on putting some
significant time into configuring your search engine properly,
reconsider your decision to implement it.
Now that we've got our warnings and threats out of the way,
we'll discuss when to implement searching systems, and how you
can make them work better.
6.1.2. When To Make Your Site Searchable
Most web sites, as we know,
aren't planned out in much detail before they're built.
Instead, they grow organically. This may be all right for smaller web
sites that aren't likely to expand much, but for ones that
become popular, more and more content and functional features get
added haphazardly, leading to a navigation nightmare.
There's a good analogy of physical architecture. Powell's
Books (http://www.powells.com), which claims to
be the largest bookstore in the world, covers an entire city block
(43,000 square feet) in Portland, Oregon. We guess that it originally
started as a single small storefront on that block, but as their
business grew, they knocked a doorway through the wall into the next
storefront, and so on, until they occupied the whole block. The
result is a hodgepodge of chambers, halls with odd turns, and
unexpected stairways. This chaotic labyrinth is a charming place to
wander and browse, but if you're searching for a particular
title, good luck. It will be difficult to find what you're
looking for, although you might serendipitously stumble onto
something better.
Yahoo! once was a Web version of Powell's. Everything was
there, but fairly easy to find. Why? Because Yahoo!, like the Web,
was relatively small. At its inception, Yahoo! pointed to a few
hundred Internet resources, made accessible through an easily
browsable subject hierarchy. No search option was available,
something unimaginable to Yahoo! users today. But things soon
changed. Yahoo! had an excellent technical architecture that allowed
site owners to easily self-register their sites, but Yahoo!'s
information architecture wasn't very well-planned, and
couldn't keep up with the increasing volume of resources that
were added daily. Eventually, the subject hierarchy became too
cumbersome to navigate, and the Yahoo! people installed a search
engine as an alternative way of finding information in the site.
Nowadays it's a decent bet that more people use Yahoo!'s
search engine instead of browsing through all those hierarchical
subject categories, although the browsable categories remain useful
as a supplement to the searching process (and, in fact, are included
in search results).
Your site probably doesn't contain as much content as Yahoo!
does, but if it's a substantial site, it probably merits a
search engine. There are good reasons for this: users won't be
willing to browse through your site's structure. Their time is
limited, and their cognitive overload threshold is lower than you
think. Interestingly, sometimes users won't browse for the
wrong reasons; that is, they search when they
don't necessarily know what to search for. Even though they
would be better served by browsing, they search anyway.
You should also consider creating a searching system for your site if
it contains highly dynamic content. For example, if your site
is a Web-based newspaper, you could be adding dozens of story files
daily. For this reason, you probably wouldn't have the time
each day to maintain elaborate tables of contents, browsable indices,
and other browsing systems. A search engine can help you by
automatically indexing the contents of the site once or many times
per day. Automating this process ensures that users have quality
access to your site's content, and you can spend time doing
things other than manually indexing and linking the story
files.
