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Search Sucks
Posted by Rebecca Rolfes on April 24, 2008
“This is the point when we probably should acknowledge that all our search sucks,” Chris Anderson told the audience of Digital Now in Orlando today. The author of The Long Tail was responding to a question about improving member experience online, about helping users find what they need in the overwhelming mountain of content on your site and everywhere else.
The first take-away, the easy one, is to let Google help you. Many association sites are behind firewalls, require sign-ups and have all sorts of barriers to effective search. Take them down, get out of Google’s way and become Google friendly. Your members will likely start there anyway unless they’re extremely familiar with your site and even then, they may go to Google first. How much the better if they do a Google search and you turn up? You could expand their opinion of you in a couple of clicks.
The second more important take-away is that context has deposed content as king. All content must be put in a context where it makes sense.
Listing your programs doesn’t help anyone. First, I need to know what you mean by program. Then I have to be interested enough to click and scroll through that list of offerings. And now, you’ve lost me and I’m back to Google.
You’ve added rich media and, likely as not, it’s listed under something like “podcasts.” Again, not helpful. Podcasts about what? Put the podcasts everywhere they make sense. Write headlines that tell me what I’m going to get.
The secret is proximity. Make your search work and then put like content with like in a way that creates context. Let tools like Digg and clouds do some of the work for you. Every page becomes a home page of its own, a little environment where users can feel at home.
You’ve already got the content. Just make it easier to find.
We are all at the point of having to ignore an awful lot of relevant content because we just don’t have the bandwidth to deal with it. Good content and relevance are nothing without good search functionality and going the extra step to create context.
Your members like you. They paid their dues, didn’t they? They’re predisposed to you in ways that should give you an edge. Make them like you more by letting them find what you’ve got, save yourself the trouble of pushing so much at them, and then see where they go so that you can get ever better at giving them what they want.
Tagged with: content, context, firewalls, member experience, relevance, search
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Comment
rrolfes said on April 24, 2008, 09:52 PM
I may have just heard how all that is about to change. Wait for my next post for more details. In the meantime, associations--and everyone else for that matter--need to do everything they can to improve their SEO so they show up on Google. The competition is only a couple of clicks away from anywhere but only one click away in a Google search.
Bud Caddell said on April 25, 2008, 12:21 AM
The problem here is that many companies still try to market outdated SEO tactics. About 90% of what mattered two years ago is absolutely pointless today. And about 75% of what 'SEO firms' market is within those practices.
Search, especially google, is driven by the wisdom of the crowd -- it's about what users find interesting, valuable, entertaining and decide to share with others through links. Certainly, you have to build a site that the search engines can read and crawl successfully, but after that it's about creating a site FOR PEOPLE.
And just a tip, if you want to search a site using google, just search for 'site:www.example.com search term' and you will get results pulled solely from that site. It's also a quick way to find out if Google is indexing your site well.
Ali Rizvi said on April 29, 2008, 04:27 PM
When search doesn't suck, you become:
19,156 full-time employees in a couple of years
An American public corporation whose stock went from 85 to 700 in less then two years
Fortune Magazine's #1 Best Place to Work
a software conglomerate, an advocate, an evironmentalist, an advertiser, an entertainer, a joker, an entertainer, a philanthropist, an idealist, an innovator, a verb, a noun, a phenomenon, an inspiration...
in other words, when your search doesn't suck you become GOOGLE.
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Erin said on April 24, 2008, 09:37 PM
Many association sites are behind firewalls, require sign-ups and have all sorts of barriers to effective search. Take them down, get out of Google’s way and become Google friendly. Your members will likely start there anyway unless they’re extremely familiar with your site and even then, they may go to Google first.
This is so, so true. Navigation is king, to be sure, but users (myself included) sometimes need to cut to the chase and what they want when they want it, and they want it via Google. Most "onsite" searches aren't nearly as effective as Google, anyway.