Introduction

Although good web design will assist site visitors to find the information they want through navigation aids and hyperlinks, visitors also expect to be able to search the site. The extent to which there is value in implementing search does depend on the content of the site and the way in which visitors will wish to locate information on it. Adding a search function because of concerns that visitors are not able to use the navigation, and hyperlinking to locate content without an overall consideration of the information architecture of the site, is not the optimal approach. It could well be that search enables the navigation itself to be revised and optimized, removing layers of hierarchy, because search is clearly positioned as a way to find information in document libraries that may well improve the usability of the site to other users.

Search is especially important in e-commerce sites, where there is product- or service-related information. One of the issues in such sites is not just the ability of the search feature to locate products, but also to be able to provide a range of ranking opportunities, such as price, size, colour, and other attributes. Any failure in metadata tagging could result in the product being found in the initial search but not when a ranked list is requested.

As a result faceted search is especially useful in e-commerce applications, and one of the best examples is that of the wine retailer www.wine.com. The Librarian's Internet Index (www.lii.org/), The Gateway (www.thegateway.org/) and the Oracle Press Navigator site (http://pressroom.oracle.com/) are all examples of the Siderean's Seamark Navigator product. There are also a number of search vendors that specialize in e-commerce applications, and these are listed in the Appendix.

The ten-step process to implementing web search

The ten steps are: