Can your customers find what they want on your website?

The truth is that many websites have fairly poor search facilities. It can be quite a challenge for programmers to write effective search algorithms that can query the relevant database tables and fields in a manner that produces sensible results. Sometimes, it requires a specialist to be able to pull together the relevant data fields and tie them to the potentially, obscure and misspelled keywords that the user has typed in.

Knowing how people think and being able to put oneself into the mind of a user, is a useful skill when designing search algorithms. Too often an industry can be blinded by its own knowledge, and the language used. Your potential customers don’t necessarily use your language or understand your business the same way you do. They’re just looking for a solution to a problem they have.

Other issues that may impact searching are data quality and database structure.