A presentation about the design patterns for search described in the book “Search Patterns” by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender, with examples from Swedish websites using the search engine SiteSeeker. The presentation was held at Geek Girl Meetup May 2010 in Stockholm, Sweden.

1. Search Patterns:
How to design a great
search experience
GeekGirlMeetup 22 May 2010
Stockholm, Sweden
Pernilla Näsfors

2. Pernilla Näsfors – Who am I?
80% developer at Euroling, the company behind the
enterprise search engine SiteSeeker for websites,
intranets and e-commerce.
20+% IT consultant at my own company Social
Polymedia, where Social = Socialt entrepreneurship
& Social media and Polymedia = multiple media.
The presentation can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/pernillanasfors

3. Today I will talk about…
Design patterns for search,
described in the book “Search Patterns”
by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender
The slides can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/pernillanasfors

4. Best First

5. Why?
In search, you’re only as good as your first
results.
The top 3 results will draw 80% of the attention.
On most sites, a few very common queries
account for a major percent of searches.
A relatively small amount of human effort can
make a big impact, by creating Best Bets.

6. Best First with Best Bets
Manually mapping the most common queries to
one or more starting points.

7. Autocomplete

8. What is Autocomplete?

9. How?
1. Pick the most common search queries
2. Find the most common inflectional form
3. Make sure all the queries get 1 or more hit
4. Match the typed letters to the suggestions
5. Look for spelling suggestions

10. Challenges
What will you do when you don’t get any
suggestions?
Match only the relevant parts of a word:
If the user starts writing ”me..” you
should match ”GeekGirlMeetup” but not
”Bummer”

11. Federated Search

12. Federated Search
Involves the simultaneous search of multiple
databases or collections.
http://creativesear.ch

13. Few segments gives the best result

14. …but it does present challenges
Remember to handle
the case when you
don’t get any hits in
the primary segment

15. Faceted Navigation

16. Faceted or Guided Navigation

17. Search within a segment with facets

18. When?
Almost ubiquitous in e-commerce given the
availability of structured metadata and the clear
business value of improving findability.
How?
Usually requires significant investment. Human
effort required for defining metadata fields and
values. Tagging can be distributed and/or semi-
automated.

19. Query Refinement using keywords from search result

20. Advanced Search

21. What?
Includes whatever simple search doesn’t
Often serves as an anti-pattern, a lesson in
what not to do...
Only a few users actually use advanced search
Is it a user-friendly query builder for novices or
a power tool for experts?

22. Can be woven into the main search experience
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23. How else might users wish to search?
Think outside the box! Explore by singing (Midomi),
drawing (GazoPa), color (Etsy, SIGNERAT.se) etc.

24. Personalization

25. Why?
A compelling vision, but personalization
is a hard problem.
What we wanted yesterday or last year
often fails to predict our interest and
wishes today and tomorrow.

26. Sometimes, personalization really works like magic
Recommendation services such as Last.fm, Glue
or Amazon can find things using similar tastes.

27. Structured Results

28. Custom interface based upon the query type
E.g. weather, stock, maps etc.

29. Actionable Results

30. Add products to your shopping basket

31. Unified Discovery

32. What?
Search rarely stands alone. In most
contexts, users move between modes of
searching, browsing, and asking.
You can also use search for other things
than it is traditionally used for.

33. Search can be used to create dynamic lists...

34. …to find related pages, based on page content...

35. ...or to find love...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU

36. Recommended reading

37. Search Patterns
by Peter Morville
and Jeffery Callender
Search pattern library online:
http://searchpatterns.org

38. Search User Interfaces
by Marti Hearst
Can be read online:
http://www.searchuserinterfaces.com

39. Tack!
Thank You!
Asante sana!

40. Pernilla Näsfors
@pernillan
pernillan@gmail.com
http://se.linkedin.com/in/pernillan
http://www.slideshare.net/pernillanasfors
@socialpolymedia
pernilla@socialpolymedia.se
http://www.socialpolymedia.se
@siteseeker_blog
pernilla@euroling.se
http://www.euroling.se