In Search Of - Industry Trend or Event

If you want good search on your site, commit to doing it right -- unless you want to alienate visitors.

Why can't we find what we're looking for on the Internet? "Do you know how many times I've heard people complain, 'Search is search?'" says Kevin Lindsay, director of product marketing at Verity, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company that specializes in search software. We can't buy, read or learn about things we can't find. Sadly, search technology has a long way to go.

"We very, very rapidly moved from the world of paper to all these electronic sources of information," says John W. Lehman, CEO of Sageware, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that categorizes and makes information searchable for Web sites and companies with large databases. "When we had paper, we had all these wonderful organizational characteristics that allowed us to figure out where the content was -- card catalogs, file folders, labels -- and then we threw them all in the trash and replaced them with an empty box that says, 'Enter your search here.' That is the state of the world."

The temptation is to blame the user for not being familiar with the technology. This is a mistake. A person shouldn't need to be trained to search a Web site or buy something. Nor should he or she always have to spell perfectly. To wit, a recent visit to CDnow and a search for rocker "Bob Segar" directed the visitor to Cathy Segal-Garcia, Helen Segara, Jerry Segarra and Nino Segarra. Ask Kodak's site about "paper to print color pictures." The result: 375 documents. What are surfers supposed to do with that?

In such cases, search fails at the most basic level -- returning results that are too numerous and irrelevant. Most companies say they are satisfied with their search functionality, yet many admitted to Forrester Research they spend minimal time and money on this technology. They often throw together a search feature when they Launch their site without thought to proper tagging or security or how to help visitors take action if they don't find what they want.

One manager told Forrester: "Last month we had an intern look at the most common search queries and then see which results were displayed. It turned out that the right answer for the top query wasn't showing up until item 47."

Another company found that once it put a "buy" button on the search-results page, 30 percent of its orders came from that spot. The lesson: Keep it simple.

Surprisingly, most companies build their own search capabilities or use whatever came with their Web servers and databases. But now the technology has advanced far enough that people who try to build their own search tools are shortchanging themselves, analysts say.

FINDERS KEEPERS

CDnow says it understands the importance of intuitive search, It hired Verity to upgrade its search capabilities in 1998, according to spokeswoman MarIo Zoda. The idea was to help customers who were misspelling artists' names - and except for a recent bug that hindered the Bob Seger search (one that's reportedly been fixed), its search capabilities are working, she says.

"If [people] can't find it, they're not going to buy it," says Zoda. "When we found out Verity had technology to improve the search functionality, it was kind of a no-brainer."

Searches also can help companies promote higher-margin products and items that may be overstocked or outdated, "all of which will increase [return on investment] on the site," says Melissa Muscio, spokeswoman for Mercado, a Palo Alto, Calif., search software firm. With competitors a click away, good search is "paramount for e-commerce sites and can be a significant source of competitive differentiation," she adds.

The irony is that when it became clear that machines weren't always able to make search work better, the logical direction for some companies was backward. People still help create directories and "train" search and database software.

But some tech companies like Mohomine - which calls itself "the soul of search" - promise to do more with fewer people. Executives at the San Diego firm assert their software finds information and brings it back summarized and usable, like human editors creating and overseeing directories; it knows whether "can" refers to a container or the ability to do something. "Once you have created a relevant database with stuff that is on point, there is no magic to searching," says Neil Senturia, Mohomine's chairman and CEO.

That's easier said than done. The costs can be substantial, ranging from $50,000 to $2 million, says Lydia Loizides, an analyst for New York-based Jupiter Communications. Forrester pegs the costs differently, at about $150,000 to license search technology and another $150,000 to integrate existing databases. Tack on another $60,000 for interface development and to identify problems by testing usability. Extras include creating a controlled vocabulary, eliminating duplicate titles or adding decent product and page descriptions, all at $4 per page.

The upshot is that an efficient search improves the bottom line: It lets people do things themselves fast, keeping them off telephone lines and online help desks, which are costly. "Tying search to preventing telephone calls really makes a good argument for the ROI question," says Paul Hagen, an analyst at Forrester Research. "You save a lot of money and end up with a happier customer."

NO IFS, ANDS OR BUTS

"I hate computers," confesses Mark Lucente, CTO of New York-based Soliloquy, a company whose software makes online shopping more conversational. "I can't stand the way you're forced to learn the computer languages and its rules."

When somebody wants to buy a notebook computer at a site running Soliloquy's software, the customer is asked a series of questions that hopefully will lead to a sale. Lucente says the company uses "dialogue mining," which amounts to tracking the customer through the process. If the shopper drops off, what was the last question answered? What was asked about first? Armed with this information, product lines can be shuffled, pitches refined.

There are other movements afoot. Some sites offer submenus instead of hundreds of unorganized links. Enter a search on a music site for "Delta Blues," and rather than a list of random artists showing up, you might get a menu that lists "history," "featured artists" and "Delta blues festivals" as options.

Other companies are realizing that when it comes to search, context is important. Context lets you search for the band "Bush" at AltaVista's new multimedia site without necessarily getting back anything on a certain presidential candidate or on shrubbery. You can create user profiles as well, which helps add context.

There still are underlying, back-end problems plaguing searches. Many disparate databases can't talk to each other, and even the easy stuff- like tagging, for example - is consistently overlooked. "Search currently is assuming that you are an expert on information retrieval," says Sageware's Lehman. "The ability to query - not only is it never taught anywhere, but these languages for queries were never designed for human beings. They were designed for [computers], so it's guaranteed that the results will be awful."

G. Patrick Pawling (apawling@cyberenet.net) is a writer in New Jersey.

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