The search provided by WordPress and other CMS is considered basic at best, and can quickly lead to user frustration and abandonment of your services. In an environment where customer expectations are often set by a company like Google, how can you improve the search experience on your site?

For Talk to me the user experience of a search should be :

• Relevant
• Customized
• Intuitive
• Quick

Here is a list (not exhaustive) of features that will simplify the life of your users

Autocomplete

As the user enters an entry, the search "completes" his or her thought by providing complete terms or results:

This experience minimizes typing, which has a particular impact on a smartphone. It allows users to find what they are looking for more quickly. It also exposes them to searches, products or pages they hadn't thought of, but may still be interested in.

This experience minimizes typing, which has a particular impact on a smartphone.

Suggestions (instant search)

The instant search allows you to directly filter the possible results as the user enters an entry.

Support for synonyms

Synonym management will decrease your users' frustration, and potentially improve sales on your website or decrease your customer service load if your user finds the information they need on their own.

For example, "basket" = "shoe" = "sneakers" or "parking sticker" = "parking badge".

Synonym management will reduce your users' frustration

Tolerance for typos and spelling errors

A typo or spelling error is usually one of the following:

• A missing letter in a word, "bojour" → "bonjour".
• A foreign letter, "bonnjour" → "bonjour"
• Reverse letters: "bonjuor" → "bonjour"
• A substituted letter: "boniour" → "bonjour"

An advanced search engine must offer the configuration of the typing error tolerance. This corresponds to the difference in spelling between a typed word and its exact match in the index.

For example, if the engine receives a word like "strm", it can mean "storm" or "strum" (distance=1 / one letter incorrect), or "star" or "warm" (distance=2 / two letters incorrect).

Segment results to improve readability and relevance

The content must be presented to the user with clearly visible categories in order to guide them to the right result. The first step is to index the various types of information on your site. To take the example of the Haute-Ecole Arc, the information is segmented according to a number of categories

This guides the user visually and reduces the number of proposals to read. In a basic search engine, everything will be on the same level, without any weighting or notion of hierarchy. A maelstrom of results.

Without segmentation, you are totally relying on the luck and patience of your users.

Customized ranking based on your customers' popularity and habits

This advanced feature is mostly used in e-commerce and online sales tools. For example, if a person tends to buy blue clothes, the first results of a future search will contain clothes of this color.

Why are we Algolia partners?

Algolia is a powerful Cloud platform that allows you to integrate on your website a search engine that meets all these criteria and more.

If you are interested, we offer a 30-minute discovery meeting.