Since the recent snow storms had a lot of us searching for many things - lost cars, small children, our sanity - I had plenty of time to think about what makes a productive search. While I'm not sure I've got much insight into snow searches, Louis Rosenfeld, author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, recently posted this list of best practices relating to search that I thought was worth reviewing:

• Keep the initial search query user interface very simple.
• Make sure your search query is in the same location on pages, and that it's on all pages.
• Allow query refinement, and allow query refinement that fits the needs (if a search produces 0 results, don't offer to refine the query).
• Show just enough information per search results to let users get the information they need (either just by viewing the results page or by letting them know if they should click through to the actual page).
• Support result sorting (chronological, alphabetical, etc), if it helps.
• Teach your search engine to recognize regularly occurring queries for specific types of information such as names of people, products, unique IDs, and configure search results accordingly.
• Ask for feedback on search results pages - both quantitative and qualitative (e.g., "rate you satisfaction with what you found; if not satisfied, what would you have liked to find?"
• Learn what your most frequent queries are; then test their performance regularly.
• Learn what queries fail most frequently, and fix them.
• Manually create recommended search results for the most common queries.

Today's web users are becoming less tolerant of having to dig through a site to find the information they need. A well designed search interface will make significant difference in how effectively your site engages visitors. If you'd like any assistance in redesigning your current search queries so that information on your site is easy to find, let me know. If you need help finding your car or your small child, you're on your own.