Dead Ends and Searching
Dead ends occur whenever you search only to see that dreaded page that says “0 results.” It can be a poor user experience to be limited to refining your search with a single textbox, not knowing if your search will return any results. Web search engines like Google can get away with this because they have billions of results to be found and dead ends are few and far between. That, and the wild wild web is so unpredictable and inconsistent that they can’t easily implement more advanced features with any real benefit.
Attribute-Driven Search Engines
I’ve made up the term “Attribute-Driven Search Engine” because I don’t know what else to call it. The idea is to display the attributes for the current search results and allow the user to click an attribute to further filter the results. As you filter the results, the new attribute list is also filtered. As a result, you’ll never reach a dead end. This characteristic is what makes this type of search engine so awesome. NewEgg, Amazon, StackOverflow — these are just some of the sites that have adopted this type of search engine.
An attribute-driven search engine can be implemented in any database-driven site where you have some level of control over your content. If you have a site like NewEgg with a wide variety of products then you’ll probably need a combination of categories and attributes. For example, when searching for processors you’ll need categories for the brand (AMD, Intel), number of cores (1, 2, 3, 4), socket type (AM2, AM3), etc.
But if you’re dealing with content more like StackOverflow you can get away with simply using tags. You can assign a variable number of tags to a given article, product, or whatever it is, and the search engine will treat the tags as the attributes. This greatly simplifies things from a management point of view as you don’t have to continually modify your categories as your site grows. You can see this in action at stackoverflow.com/questions if you start clicking the tags on the right hand side under “Related Tags.” If you’d like you can keep clicking tags to add to the filter until you’re down to just 1 result.
The SilverlightShaders.net Search Engine
So I’ve been giving all of this a lot of thought. I think having a good search engine can be very important for a website. Maybe it’s not such a big deal when it’s small. But once you have accumulated 500+ items to search through, then it quickly becomes more difficult to navigate the site.
So what I’m implementing for SilverlightShaders.net takes aspects of sites I’ve done before and combines them with features of StackOverflow. Every pixel shader will have tags assigned to it, and combined with full-text searching this should allow you to find what you’re looking for.
Oh, and there’s one other thing. Since I still allow you to search using a textbox, there’s still the possibility of reaching dead ends. So I’ve implemented a simple feature to prevent this. I’ve added some AJAX which searches as you type and tells you how many results there will be before you actually click “Search.”
This is all working with my sample data. And I think this combination of features should allow this search engine to scale well. But only time will tell. I’m just about to move from shared hosting to a virtual dedicated server. After that’s done I’ll try to get a beta site out there where you guys can check this out. I’d love to hear some feedback.
Please leave a comment below for Steve.
Original post by Steve Wortham here:
Caronte Web
Federated Search
Highlight Health
MSearchGroove
Ramenos Blog
Reel SEO
Software Abstractions
The Genius Files
The Next Web
August 28th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Another solution to the “dreaded 0 results page” is to provide a “cooperative response”. A cooperative response is so useful that savvy users may try to get “0 results” on purpose by issuing overconstrained queries. For more info see our white paper “A brief overview of cooperative answering” at http://www.pomcor.com/whitepapers/cooperative_responses.pdf or the search engine “Noflail Search” at noflail.com, which provides cooperative responses. Or reply this comment here, or contact me directly at fcorella at pomcor.com.
Francisco
August 30th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Sorry if I misunderstood but it sure sounds like you discovered faceted browsing? Do a search, then drill down by categories?
It’s not a new thing, many “next generation library catalogues” like Encore, Aquabrower, Primo etc implement something similar. You know it’s not cutting edge, if even library catalogues start to add them.
August 31st, 2009 at 8:51 am
Aaron,
It’s not quite the same thing to drill down by categories. An item may be within a category and within a category of that category and so on. That’s a simple hierarchical structure and not much of a search engine.
With attributes, it’s a little different because multiple attributes can define a single item. And since only the attributes of the remaining search results are shown, it can be a very useful method for finding what you want. If you take a look at the StackOverflow site you can see what I mean at http://stackoverflow.com/questions
Of course this method isn’t new either. The first time I saw it was from a company called Endeca 8 years ago. They would implement this style of search engine for other companies for a price. I guess they probably still do. But I don’t remember the last time I’ve read anything about it. And I wanted to talk about the inspiration behind the Silverlight Shaders search engine.
You can also see what I’m working on at http://beta.silverlightshaders.net/pixel/