I’ve mentioned before that Jared Spool’s studies show that people who use Web site search succeed just 34% of the time. Why are searchers so disappointed in Web site searches?
Blame it on Google. Fifty-nine percent of U.S. Internet users employ an Internet search engine (such as Google) every day, according to Pew Research. Such high usage has developed because Internet searchers succeed—one study shows that 97 percent of Google’s Internet searchers find what they are looking for all or most of the time. In fact, your visitors already think they are good searchers from their experience with Google. One survey says that 92 percent of Web users are “confident in their searching abilities”—52 percent are “highly confident.”
With so many successful experiences in Internet searches, it’s no wonder that a big problem for site search facilities is one of expectations—Google raised ’em and searchers expect your Web site search to work as well as Google. Why doesn’t it? And why shouldn’t you just replace your site search technology with Google? Wouldn’t that fix everything?
Probably not. The sad truth is that Google (or any good search engine) may do a better job searching the whole Web than it does searching a single Web site. Internet search engines use link analysis to find the the pages with the best links from other sites. But that information economy does not exist on a single Web site. That’s why a search engine designed to search the entire Internet may not do the best job for your Web site search.
My company makes a free search engine designed to provide high relevance on Web sites, but many other companies do, too. The more you know about how search engines work, the easier it is to find the right one for you. Or you can just pick the one with the big name.
