Best practices for implementing site search

Site search can be a great resource for your visitors, but only if it’s done right.

In terms of best practices - it's really a case of understanding

• your (meta)data taxonomy
• how users interact with your site - what are they looking for, and why? That should drive out the search experience.

In more general terms, functional things to think about include:

• Search suggestions (auto-suggest)
• Facets - used for refining search results
• Paging - size and UX (continuous paging or previous <> next style)
• Sorting - by which fields
• Relevance - in the absence of an explicit sort, how do you define relevance
• Synonyms
• Misspellings
• Multi-term / phrase-based searches
• The OpenSearch protocol is worth looking at
• Search API - not just about the website
• Format support - HTML, XML, JSON

Search experts will often tell you that the search box is the search of last resort - if the information architecture for the site is good, and personalisation has been done right the user should rarely need to search - the information should be there in front of them - or at least clear signposts.