We all know that anything to do with search is hot these days.
And now the smart companies are starting to take a closer look at the search engines on their own sites.
Whether you call this “site search” or “internal search” or ‘who-knows-what’ search, I predict this area is going to see a lot of excitement and evolution in the next few years.
I recently completed a fascinating site search consulting project for a large media company. Since they publish a number of magazines, they have a vast content archive and a vested interest in making it as easy as possible for Website visitors to be able to get to their content as efficiently as possible.
My company was hired to help the media company understand how to improve their site search. During the course of the project, my colleagues and I developed an unofficial list of what we started to refer to as “Site Search Best Practices.” These best practices are independent of any one particular site search system (i.e., the technology solution) and will be of benefit to any company, large or small, that is implementing site search.
So, without much further ado, here are some of our Site Search Best Practices:
Category: Web Sites
_This article is by Guest Contributor Jon Lax._
It’s no secret that newspapers have had a hard time lately. The financial engine of the newspaper business has for many years been classifieds. Something like $7 billion in classified revenues has just disappeared since 1997 (US stats) and it’s not coming back. People just aren’t looking for cars, jobs or general merchandise in the newspaper like they used to. Sites like “eBay”:http://www.ebay.ca, “craigslist”:http://www.craigslist.com, “Autotrader”:http://www.autotrader.ca, “Monster”:http://www.monster.ca provide a better and cheaper product.
“CanWest”:http://www.canwest.com/ is launching a series of sites to put innovative classifieds products online. We were asked to participate in the redesign/relaunch of the auto classifieds product called “driving.ca”:http://www.driving.ca.
Okay, I know I’ve been really grumpy about my ‘net experiences lately, but this morning was very different. I’ve been a registered user at globeandmail.com for a while, and that was fine. Not too exciting, and in fact if they’d wanted to send me email I would have been fine with that, but they didn’t bother me.
Then, feeling like a belated convert, after a long time sighing every time I saw one of those darn “Insiders only” keys next to an article that looked interesting, I finally signed up.