The Sad eCommerce Search Realities
September 9, 2015
We love it when articles make pop cultures references as a way to get their point across. Over at Easy Ask, an articled entitled “ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ – The Realities of eCommerce Search” references the Keith Richards and Mick Jagger song explaining how a Web site loses a customer. The potential customer searches for an product, fails to find using the search feature, so the person moves onto a new destination.
What happens is that a Web site search function might not understand all the query terms or it might return results that fail to meet the shopper’s need. The worst option any eCommerce shop could show a shopper is a “no results found” page. It might be a seem like simple feature to overcome, but search algorithms need to be fine tuned like any other coding. The good news that decent eCommerce searches have already been designed.
“How can you avoid these misunderstandings? One approach is to employ search software that understands the words in the search and how they relate to each other and the site’s catalog. These search engines are called ‘Contextual Search’ and employ ‘Natural Language Processing’ software. Remember diagramming sentences in elementary school and identifying the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Knowing the role of a word in a website search helps find the right products.”
Contextual search that uses natural language processing treats queries based on a user’s true intentions, rather than giving each term the same weight. Contextual search is more intuitive and yields more accurate results. The article finishes by saying the customers “get what they need.” Ah, what a wise use of The Rolling Stones.
Whitney Grace, September 9, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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