0 Results - What more do I have to provide?
We have to admit - there is a difference between people using computers - and those actually understand how computers work. Me - in the later - can't go back and think like somebody from the 1st category. Although I think I can - in fact - I can't.
One thing I had to learn while closely looking at people using local.ch is - if the search engine doesn't find an answer (0 Results), people add more words into the search field. With the "obvious" result - still 0 results. We do provide a hint to the user in this case "Remove search terms. The engine does a AND query with all your terms." but a majority of users don't read advices.
It was until today, that this behaviour was a mystery to me.
It's from conversations between people - when trying to build a context. An example is asking:
A: "Do you remember the German from the party last night?"
B: "Who?"
A: "You know.. they guy with the crazy T-shirt?"
B: "What?"
A: "The one giving the spontaneous piano jam session."
B: "Ahh.. yes - sure - was cool!"
The first two questions provided 0 results.. adding more information to the query end up with the result in the brain of person B.
Make sense right?
The question is .. how to code a search engine that can do that? Or detect this behaviour and change search strategy...
(I'm working on it)
A special thanks to Angie for providing me this insight during her speech at Orbit-iEX this morning. Small wonders...
One thing I had to learn while closely looking at people using local.ch is - if the search engine doesn't find an answer (0 Results), people add more words into the search field. With the "obvious" result - still 0 results. We do provide a hint to the user in this case "Remove search terms. The engine does a AND query with all your terms." but a majority of users don't read advices.
It was until today, that this behaviour was a mystery to me.
It's from conversations between people - when trying to build a context. An example is asking:
A: "Do you remember the German from the party last night?"
B: "Who?"
A: "You know.. they guy with the crazy T-shirt?"
B: "What?"
A: "The one giving the spontaneous piano jam session."
B: "Ahh.. yes - sure - was cool!"
The first two questions provided 0 results.. adding more information to the query end up with the result in the brain of person B.
Make sense right?
The question is .. how to code a search engine that can do that? Or detect this behaviour and change search strategy...
(I'm working on it)
A special thanks to Angie for providing me this insight during her speech at Orbit-iEX this morning. Small wonders...
Interesting thoughts and example (though, the What?!? could also mean too many matches).
My proposal for a solution:
In multi-word queries, indicate how many hits each term for itself created. Tell the user to click on a term if there are no results from the AND.
e.g.
German guy (0), Crazy T-Shirt (0), Piano Player (1)
0 Result matching all your terms.
Hint: Some of your terms did match entries in our database. Please click on the term to display them.
--
Of course a fancy web 2.0 visualizing possible match intersections would be even cooler, but then that's probably again something for the other part of humanity - Die Suchmaschinenversteher.
Posted by
Adrian |
May 22, 2008 12:24 AM
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