Articles about Search

• Google, User Experience, and Thinking Beyond Conversion 08/24/2010
  

  Jeffrey Eisenberg explains how Google's Quality Score helps designers produce a better site, while helping marketers get better search rankings.

• Spending Quality Time with Your Search Log 01/06/09/2010
  

  Jared Spool walks you through some of the questions we answer when we're studying a client's search log.

• Three Perils with Search Landing Pages 12/15/09/2009
  

  Jared Spool talks about about some perils seen when users clicked on sponsored links, only to be disappointed by the results.

• Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content 03/01/2005
  

  Accurate search engines and other up-to-the-minute content aggregators are drastically changing the game of web design. It's turning into a situation where the information architecture that is most important isn't the one that's on your web site, but the one on everyone else's.

• Why Amazon Succeeds--And Why It Won't Help You 06/20/2002
  

  Amazon is one of the best on-site search capabilities we've ever seen. But surprisingly, the reason why it works so well is likely to be the same reason why Search won't work well on your site. This article discusses how Amazon can take advantage of having "uniquely identified content", an advantage most sites don't have.

• Users Don't Learn To Search Better 11/27/2001
  

  When we watched 30 users trying to search various sites for content they were interested in, we noticed a peculiar phenomenon: The more times the users searched, the less likely they were to find what they wanted.

• People Search Once, Maybe Twice 11/20/2001
  

  In a 2001 research study, we observed that users only found their target content 34% of the time with Search (less than with categories). We wanted to know why.

• Are There Users Who Always Search? 05/01/2001
  

  Web designers often tell us that they spend a great deal of their time and resources working to improve their on-site search engines because, they believe, there are some people who always rely on the search engine to reach their target content. Here's what we found.

• Why On-Site Searching Stinks 09/01/1997
  

  Back in 1997, we watched users look for information on web sites. Users went to these search engines in almost half the tasks. As you'll read in this article, maybe they shouldn't have.