A Retail Site Where the Search Box Finds Nothing

The site

An art supply shop in a two-storey building near a college campus. Paint, paper, brushes, canvases, easels and framing supplies, with an online store of about four thousand products.

The products came from distributors' data files when the store launched, with their titles, descriptions and photographs unchanged.

A search box sits in the header of every page. It is the search that came built into the store software, and nobody has looked at its settings since.

Type watercolour paper and it returns nothing. The shop carries more than thirty kinds.

The inference a visitor makes

A student searching the site late at night types what they need and gets a page saying no products were found.

They do not conclude that the search is badly set up. They conclude that the shop does not sell watercolour paper.

Then they draw a wider conclusion. If a shop this size has none of something so ordinary, its range must be thin, and the next search goes to a large online retailer.

The visitor who searches is often the one closest to buying, since they already know what they want. That is the visitor this site turns away.

What visitors typed

• Canadian spellings, such as watercolour, against American product titles.
• Plurals, such as brushes, when titles say brush.
• Misspellings, such as acryllic and pallete.
• Product types, such as sketchbook, when titles give only a brand and series.
• Two words or one, such as paint brush and paintbrush.
• Several words at once, such as large canvas for acrylic.

The first is the one particular to a Canadian shop. Its customers spell the way they were taught, and much of its supplier data was written for the American market.

Spelling the way customers do

The built-in search looks for the exact letters typed. Watercolour and watercolor differ by one letter, so to the search they are unrelated words.

Every customer who spells it the Canadian way is told the shop has none.

Misspellings fail the same way. Acryllic matches nothing, though everyone who typed it wanted acrylic paint.

Better search tools allow for a letter or two of difference, and let the shop keep a list of equivalent words: watercolour and watercolor, grey and its American spelling, sketchbook and sketch book.

Plurals and joined words

A search for brush finds products called brushes, because the letters of brush appear inside brushes. A search for brushes finds nothing titled brush.

Customers type plurals naturally, since they are picturing a shelf rather than a single item, and few try again with the singular.

Joined and split words fail the same way: paintbrush against paint brush.

The fix is a search that reduces words to a common root, often called stemming, so brush and brushes count as the same word.

Products named by brand, searched by type

Distributor titles name the brand, the series and the size. Many never say what the product is, because the distributor assumed buyers would know.

A spiral-bound book of drawing paper, titled with a brand and a series number, does not contain the word sketchbook anywhere, so a search for sketchbook skips it.

The shop's own categories use plain words, but the built-in search does not look at categories at all. The words customers use are on the site, just not where the search looks.

Searches with several words make it worse, since every word has to appear somewhere in a product's text before it counts as a match.

A dead end instead of a results page

When a search fails, the page says no products were found matching your selection, and nothing else.

No suggestions, no categories, no phone number, no offer to check the stockroom. The visitor has nowhere to go but back, or away.

Even a good search will sometimes fail, so this page matters. It should suggest close matches, show the main categories, and say plainly that the shop carries more in store and will answer a quick question.

A worked example

The shop's plan for the spring was to add two thousand more products from a second distributor.

Before that, its web company turned on site search tracking in Analytics and read three months of searches. Many of the most frequent had returned nothing at all.

Adding products to that search would only have added more things nobody could find, so the search was fixed first.

The built-in search was replaced with one that handles plurals and small misspellings, and looks at titles, categories and tags.

Staff wrote a list of equivalent words from the failed searches: Canadian and American spellings, joined and split words, and the trade names students use.

Titles in the busiest categories were rewritten to start with what the product is, then the brand. The no-results page now offers close matches, the main categories and the shop's phone number.

The second distributor's products went in afterwards under the same rules, so their titles say what things are from the start.

Reading the failed searches monthly

Fixing search is not a single job. New products bring new names, and customers find new ways to spell them.

Once a month, someone should read the searches that returned nothing and decide for each: a missing equivalent word, a title to rewrite, or a product the shop genuinely does not carry.

The last group is useful too. Ten people a month searching for something you do not stock is a buying suggestion.

The counter-case within the site

A shop with a few dozen products may not need a search box at all. Clear categories, two or three clicks deep, serve a short range better.

A search box that fails is worse than none, because it invites a question and then answers it wrongly.

And some searches will always fail, because the shop does not carry the thing. There, the job is an honest no-results page, not a cleverer search.

For a shop with thousands of products, the order holds: fix how search matches words, give it a useful dead end, then add products.

What to change

1. Turn on site search tracking in Analytics.
2. List the searches that return nothing.
3. Use a search that handles plurals and misspellings.
4. Add equivalent words for local spellings.
5. Rewrite titles to say what each product is.
6. Give the no-results page somewhere to go.
7. Fix search before adding more products.

Step five does the most lasting good, because a title that says what the product is helps every search tool, every category page and every customer scanning a list.

Setting up the tracking that shows what people type is covered in site search and what visitors type into the box.

Frequently asked questions

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