Enhancing search capabilities on real web sites.

"Search and split." That's what most visitors do when they can't find what they're looking for on a web site. Though most sites are designed for "stickiness," there's no better way to lose the grip on visitors than when they can't find what they want or the information they need. Yet far too few companies place an emphasis on the effectiveness of their site's search engine.

A recent study conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology indicates that almost 70% of web users utilize site search engines. Ideally, search engines should be extremely easy to navigate -- as simple as walking up to a broker and asking for information.

But for most informational web sites, the key problem is that companies don't know they have a problem. Little testing is done to evaluate effectiveness but instead on cost of ownership and complexity from an IT perspective. Customers or visitors will rarely tell you when they can't find information. Unlike the usual visitor, most webmasters and IT professionals are far too sophisticated when it relates to search techniques and don't think like the common person. What's more, they built the web site, so they know exactly where to find this.

Without getting overly technical, a basic understanding of what is important in a search engine, will vastly improve the functionality and ease of use of the site in a cost-effective way. Some factors to consider are:

1. Absence of Gobbledygook: Does your search engine return results laden with relevance percentages, links that have been dead for months, and other meaningless terminology? It shouldn't. What good does a 73% return on "condominiums" do for the average bank site user? Absolutely nothing. The best search results are ordered in relevance minus the useless symbols, numbers and words. One search engine, MondoSearch, is particularly effective in this area and provides clean, non-jargon search results.

2. Fully Categorized Search Results: It's critical that a search engine present results in sensible groups and logical categories based on the specific structure of your web site. This enables your visitors to receive information faster than sorting through irrelevant topics. For example, if a visitor inputs "real estate", the "best" answer depends on a number of factors. Is the person a property owner, lessee or broker? Is the person looking for an apartment to rent, a lakeside cottage to purchase, or a buyer for a piece of property overseas? Do they want a lease application, a brokerage license, or to research current property laws? Obviously, there is no way to discern these elements through "real estate", but categorization provides segmented search results, making it easy for visitors to find their information quickly and efficiently.

3. Description, Description and More Description: Search engine users tend to assume their results will include all of the web site's data. This is not a feature common to all search engines; high-end search engines such as MondoSearch include the results' descriptions while listing all the pages where the search words are located.

4. Language Recognition: A business is global, customers are multinational, and so is the site content information. English speaking visitors don't want to sort through documents, find one that's relevant and then find out it's in French. Embrace diversity and choose a search engine that offers multiple-language recognition. Each of the major search engine companies differs in the languages they support.

5. Multimedia Recognition: As bandwidth expands, multimedia content on web sites will grow as well. Search engines need to be capable of conforming with convergence and indicate whether a citation is text, pictures, video, audio, PDF or whatever new formats spring to life.

6. Search Assistance Features: Quality site-search tools share one underlying feature: the ability to allow the user to tweak his or her search query before and after the original requests.

7. To ASP or not to ASP: A number of search engine companies offer their information retrieval solutions on an application service provider basis or (ASP) which basically outsources a lot of the maintenance and updating of the site. The benefits are clear: it isn't necessary to purchase the server, and the IT staff won't need to dedicate significant time or energy towards maintaining it. Set it and forget it. However, if a site is relatively small, a more cost-efficient out-of-box solution might be appropriate.

Jeff Linnell is president of the Liquid Design Group, a Silicon Alley-based design agency that specializes in Internet and intranet development, multimedia and broadcast animation. LDG provides services from web development to high-end visual effects for companies like the Financial Times, Citibank, MTV, NASDAQ, Real Media, Sprint, Pepsi and others.