Choosing the Right Search Results Page Layout: Make the Most of Your Width

Page layout forms the foundation in presenting search results. Your layout decisions for search results pages will have tremendous impact on the user experience for your entire site. Choosing the right width for search results is important, and the optimal width for search results may be a great deal narrower than some people using big monitors would believe.

Nudelman, Greg. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search

Starting from Zero: Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages

Search results pages are some of the most visited pages on typical e-commerce sites—to say nothing of a search engine like Google. Many articles appear each year about optimal search algorithms, database performance, and the like. In contrast, very few publications focus on improving the search experience from the customer’s perspective.

Nudelman, Greg. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Usability

Investigating Behavioral Variability in Web Search  

Understanding the extent to which people’s search behaviors differ in terms of the interaction flow and information targeted is important in designing interfaces to help World Wide Web users search more effectively. In this paper we describe a longitudinal log-based study that investigated variability in people’s interaction behavior when engaged in search-related activities on the Web. We analyze the search interactions of more than two thousand volunteer users over a five-month period, with the aim of characterizing differences in their interaction styles. The findings of our study suggest that there are dramatic differences in variability in key aspects of the interaction within and between users, and within and between the search queries they submit. Our findings also suggest two classes of extreme user--navigators and explorers--whose search interaction is highly consistent or highly variable. Lessons learned from these users can inform the design of tools to support effective Web-search interactions for everyone.

White, Ryen W. and Steven M. Drucker. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>User Centered Design

Why We Search: Visualizing and Predicting User Behavior  

The aggregation and comparison of behavioral patterns on the WWW represent a tremendous opportunity for understanding past behaviors and predicting future behaviors. In this paper, we take a first step at achieving this goal. We present a large scale study correlating the behaviors of Internet users on multiple systems ranging in size from 27 million queries to 14 million blog posts to 20,000 news articles. We formalize a model for events in these time-varying datasets and study their correlation. We have created an interface for analyzing the datasets, which includes a novel visual artifact, the DTWRadar, for summarizing differences between time series. Using our tool we identify a number of behavioral properties that allow us to understand the predictive power of patterns of use.

Adar, Eytan, Daniel S. Weld, Brian N. Bershad and Steven D. Gribble. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Research

Web Object Retrieval  

The primary function of current Web search engines is essentially relevance ranking at the document level. However, myriad structured information about real-world objects is embedded in static Web pages and online Web databases. Document-level information retrieval can unfortunately lead to highly inaccurate relevance ranking in answering object-oriented queries. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift to enable searching at the object level. In traditional information retrieval models, documents are taken as the retrieval units and the content of a document is considered reliable. However, this reliability assumption is no longer valid in the object retrieval context when multiple copies of information about the same object typically exist. These copies may be inconsistent because of diversity of Web site qualities and the limited performance of current information extraction techniques. If we simply combine the noisy and inaccurate attribute information extracted from different sources, we may not be able to achieve satisfactory retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose several language models for Web object retrieval, namely an unstructured object retrieval model, a structured object retrieval model, and a hybrid model with both structured and unstructured retrieval features. We test these models on a paper search engine and compare their performances. We conclude that the hybrid model is the superior by taking into account the extraction errors at varying levels.

Nie, Zaiqing, Yunxiao Ma, Shuming Shi, Ji-Rong Wen and Wei-Ying Ma. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search

The Discoverability of the Web  

Previous studies have highlighted the high arrival rate of new content on the web. We study the extent to which this new content can be efficiently discovered by a crawler. Our study has two parts. First, we study the inherent difficulty of the discovery problem using a maximum cover formulation, under an assumption of perfect estimates of likely sources of links to new content. Second, we relax this assumption and study a more realistic setting in which algorithms must use historical statistics to estimate which pages are most likely to yield links to new content. We recommend a simple algorithm that performs comparably to all approaches we consider. We measure the overhead of discovering new content, de- fined as the average number of fetches required to discover one new page. We show first that with perfect foreknowledge of where to explore for links to new content, it is possible to discover 90% of all new content with under 3% overhead, and 100% of new content with 9% overhead. But actual algorithms, which do not have access to perfect foreknowl- edge, face a more difficult task: one quarter of new content is simply not amenable to efficient discovery. Of the re- maining three quarters, 80% of new content during a given week may be discovered with 160% overhead if content is recrawled fully on a monthly basis.

Dasgupta, Anirban, Arpita Ghosh, Ravi Kumar, Christopher Olston, Sandeep Pandey and Andrew Tomkins. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Information Design

Making $10,000 a Pixel: Optimizing Thumbnail Images in Search Results

In search results, the old adage a picture is worth a thousand words rings true. When it comes to making your search results more efficient to use, more relevant, and more attractive, images reign supreme. There is simply nothing else on your search results pages that can come close to offering the same potential as thumbnail images for dramatically increasing your conversion rates and revenues.

Nudelman, Greg. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>Search

Ten Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic

In the last six months, we've been lucky enough to help quite a few companies and websites drive significant traffic to their sites. Many of these campaigns have been constructed around the goal of building search engine rankings, as this is our primary business, but we've also found that our ability has given us great power in the fields of brand-awareness and marketing overall. Thus, the following ten processes are primarily about building traffic and through it, attention.

SEOmoz (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Ranking Factors

This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value - although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google's algorithm is contained below.

SEOmoz (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization Through Accessibility: How Designing Accessible Websites Leads to Automatic SEO

This presentation describes how creating an accessible website takes care of its (organic) search engine optimization to a very appreciable extent taking reference from the WCAG 2.0 working draft and the Google webmaster guidelines.This presentation was created and presented by Abhay Rautela to the Sapient creative community at the New Delhi office in February 2007.

Rautela, Abhay. Cone Trees (2007). Presentations>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization

Designing for Faceted Search

Faceted search, or guided navigation, has become the de facto standard for e-commerce and product-related websites, from big box stores to product review sites. But e-commerce sites aren’t the only ones joining the facets club. Other content-heavy sites such as media publishers (e.g. Financial Times: ft.com), libraries (e.g. NCSU Libraries: lib.ncsu.edu/), and even non-profits (e.g. Urban Land Institute: uli.org) are tapping into faceted search to make their often broad-range of content more findable. Essentially, faceted search has become so ubiquitous that users are not only getting used to it, they are coming to expect it.

Lemieux, Stephanie. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search

Indexing the Web—It’s Not Just Google’s Business

Web databases do much more than passively store information. Part of their power comes from indexing records efficiently. An index serves as a map, identifying the precise location of a small piece of data in a much larger pile. For example, when I search for “web development,” Google identifies two hundred million results and displays the first ten—in a quarter of a second. But Google isn’t loading every one of those pages and scanning their contents when I perform my search: they’ve analyzed the pages ahead of time and matched my search terms against an index that only references the original content.

Mullican, Lyle. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Your Website is a Satellite. Contextual Search is the Sun

The internet is more like the heliocentric model championed by Galileo, with search as the sun. It is an ever-growing collection of distribution channels, each with their own audience, revolving around an increasingly contextual search experience. It’s time to expand your perspective to account for this. But, like Galileo, you may have a hard time with the authorities as you start to act on this understanding.

Tipping Point Labs (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization

The Illusion of SEO vs. the Reality of Great Content

SEO techniques will increase your search rankings and SEM will get you traffic on the top search engines. But a boatload of quality content will also accomplish these things and prepare you for the more contextual future of search.

Tipping Point Labs (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Search Engine Optimization

Is Your Key Content Drowning in News?

Many web editors spend a lot of their time writing news stories for the company web site. However, traffic analysis frequently reveals that this content is not very popular - and that users may in fact miss the key content they come to find (product data, addresses etc.) because it's practically drowning in news stories.

Furu, Nina. Content Strategy (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

How To Get Better Search Engine Rankings

If your company web site is currently not ranking well at search engines, you are missing out on a vital source of web traffic. Here are some tips for improving your search engine rankings yourself (without hiring a search engine optimization company).

Content Strategy (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

The ten essential categories for good optimization are: important HTML tags, search engine indexing limits, title tag syntax, common canonical issues, 301 redirects on Apache, search engine robot user agents, common robot traps to avoid, robot meta tags syntax, robots.txt syntax and site map syntax.

Dover, Danny. SEOmoz (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Using the Repertory Grid and Laddering Technique to Determine the User's Evaluative Model of Search Engines    

The purpose of this research is to explore a method for the determination of users' representations of search engines, formed during their interaction with these systems. Determines the extent to which these elicited "mental models" indicate the system aspects of importance to the user and from this their evaluative view of these tools.

Johnson, Frances C. and Sarah E. Crudge. Journal of Documentation (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>User Centered Design

Search Goal Redefinition Through User-System Interaction    

The purpose of this research is to examine search goal redefinition during users' interaction with information retrieval systems.

Hider, Philip M. Journal of Documentation (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>User Interface

Best Practices for Designing Faceted Search Filtersn

Recently, Office Depot redesigned their search user interface, adding attribute-based filtering and creating a more dynamic, interactive user experience. Unfortunately, Office Depot’s interaction design misses some key points, making their new search user interface less usable and, therefore, less effective. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Office Depot site presents us with an excellent case study for demonstrating some of the important best practices for designing filters for faceted search results.

Nudelman, Greg. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Usability

Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision

Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it’s also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. When it comes to site search, user experience designers are often sidelined like the single person at an old flame’s wedding: Everything seems to be moving along without you, and if you slipped out halfway through, chances are no one would notice. But relevancy testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can use to analyze and improve the search user experience.

Ferrara, John. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Assessment

Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering!

Now when people show up at a website, many of them ignore our lovingly crafted navigational elements and jump to the site search box. The increased use of site search as a core navigation method makes it very important to understand the data that site search generates.

Kaushik, Avinash. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Usability

Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up

While goal-driven analysis is wonderfully useful, we’ll explore a different, “bottom-up” approach that relies on pattern analysis and failure analysis to help you understand your users’ intent in qualitative ways that complement the top-down approach.

Rosenfeld, Louis. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Assessment