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the redemption of search
The value of keyword search for e-commerce sites has taken a bit of a battering
over the past few months! The latest research suggests it is used as a last
resort when browsing fails, it makes customers less likely to find what they
are looking for, and even if the perfect search engine could be developed,
customers still wouldn't want to use it . But just as the nails are poised over
its coffin lid, search may just be about to stage a spectacular recovery.
the research findings
It has been known for some time that search is not used much on e-commerce
sites. DoubleClick's 2004 E-Commerce Trend Report, for
example, reported that search was used in only 20% of shopping sessions. This
might, of course, be due to search working badly on most e-commerce sites. In
our Online Retail User Experience Benchmarks report, we
showed that keyword search failed to find over half of the products actually
available on the site being searched! To make matters even worse, over 80% of
the search results were not the item being sought.
So, it could be argued, the perfect search engine would restore customer
confidence in search and increase its use on e-commerce sites. Well, not
according to recent research! Kathy Straub of Human Factors International studied a
Government medical information site where keyword search was more
successful than browsing at leading users to the content they wanted.
This, therefore, should lead to much greater use of search when these users
returned on subsequent visits. But it didn't! A browse-first strategy was
adopted on 91% of return visits. The reasons for this were revealed in another
research study. Researchers at MIT conducted in-depth interviews to try
to discover why their computer students (who wouldn't be expected to be lacking
in either computing competence or confidence!) used search for only 39% of
their personal research despite knowing exactly what information they were
looking for in advance. The secret, they discovered, was that greater cognitive
effort was required to articulate what they were looking for, compared to
browsing.
It was back in 1984 that the term 'cognitive misers' was first coined to
describe human decision-making - it means that we take mental shortcuts to
minimise the thinking effort we need to make to solve a problem. We choose
satisfactory rather than optimum solutions to problems. We make the easy but
often incorrect assumption that familiar things occur more commonly than
unfamiliar things. We infer a great deal about the choices we face from the
context in which they are presented, because that context gives us a more
effortless basis for our decisions. And most importantly, for this discussion,
we will make choices on the basis of how much cognitive effort is involved.
Evidence for this comes from research by Garbarino and Edell who demonstrated that products
appear less attractive and are purchased less frequently when the cognitive
effort required to evaluate them is experimentally increased. So, we don't like
having to make additional cognitive effort and will avoid it if possible. We
will, therefore avoid the extra effort to think about what to enter in a
keyword search box if browsing via link navigation is offered as an
alternative.
the redemption
So who is coming to the rescue of the beleaguered search-box? Well, Google of
course! Google Suggest, which launched in beta late last year,
fundamentally changed how people interact with search functionality (see
footnote). As soon as you enter the first letter of your search term, a
list of links appear suggesting likely terms that you might be interested in.
The more letters you enter the more specific the suggestions become. For the
most popular searches, this is useful but the range of potential search terms
in Google is so vast that its value is probably limited. For an e-commerce
site, on the other hand, where the likely search terms are more limited, the
value is likely to be much greater. Here is a demonstration of how prompted
search could work on a hypothetical department store site (only populated with
search terms beginning with A-D, for demo purposes).
So, we now have keyword search that prompts the customer with the terms
available to be found on the site as soon as they've typed the first letter.
This substantially reduces the cognitive effort involved in the search process
(although it doesn't eliminate it!) and thus would be expected to make search a
much more attractive prospect.
Footnote
It should be noted here that Google Suggest brought the underlying AJAX technology
to widespread attention but it is not Google's invention. The origins of the
technology can, in fact, be traced right back to 1997 (see
Wikipedia's entry on the adoption of AJAX).