How to Fix Search on Your Site

In the midst of creating great web user interfaces, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the second-most used user interface on your site: the search box.

Here’s list of 10 things you can do to make search work better:

1. Review your search logs. 
   What is it that people are searching for? Keep track of the top 50 search phrases on your site.
2. Check the format of your search results.
   Are you getting “clean” results? In plain English? Is it easy to read the title and description of each page in the listing? Or is there junk like navigation text in there? Nothing looks worse than the description of your page reading “About Us”, “Admissions”, “News and Events”, and so on. Update the formatting of your results accordingly.
3. Make sure you have great content for your top search phrases.
   The best way to make sure you’re providing great search results is to have great content about the terms that visitors are searching for. Create at least one “perfect” page that a visitor who searched for a specific term would want to see. 
4. Make use of “best bets” functionality.
   Many search engines have the ability to force certain content to the top of the search results by keyword. Create a best bet for each of your top search terms and point it at the perfect content you’ve created.
5. Review your metadata.
   Google and the major search engines may no longer pay attention to metadata, but you can use it to tune your internal search engine. Make sure all your pages have descriptive titles, meta keywords that make sense. and good meta descriptions. 
6. Train your content authors.
   Put together a 2‑pager on “how to make sure your content shows up properly on our search engine”, and include it with the materials you give to all web authors on campus.
7. Check your indexes. 
   Usually its been a while since you’ve checked what exactly your search engine is indexing. Have you brought up a new sub-site with a different URL? It may not be included in your index. Take a quick inventory of all your sites and make sure that the right ones are being spidered.
8. Axe the “advanced search.”
   If there’s one thing that Google should have taught us by now its that simpler is better when it comes to search. You should have a single search box. No making the visitor pick the “collection” they want to search from. No and/or searches. And absolutely no option to “Search the Internet.” Come on, if your visitor wants to search the Internet they will go to Google.com, not your site.
9. Tune your search tool.
   Check the settings on your search software. Configure duplicate checking to make sure you don’t show the same document more than once. Implement “no-index” tags to eliminate navigation and footers/copyrights from your search results. 
10. Make it somebody’s job to maintain the quality of the search over time. 
    Part of the problem is that at most institutions, it isn’t clear who is responsible for the quality of the search results. Someone in IT installs the search engine, sets it to spider the site, and nobody thinks about it again. Give someone the job of regularly checking those top searches (they will change over time, and you’ll see seasonal changes too), and making sure that you’re generating good results for those terms. 

Once you’ve done all those, you might think about spending a couple of bucks on new search software. Which one should you buy? For what its worth, I would say 70% of our clients have selected Google Mini.