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Scotts Searching :: Good Search Trick :: Over Searching
A really good search technique which many people often ignore is "Over Searching". When you over search, you take a query and expand it to be not just what the user asked for but what the user is likely to want. Here's a step by step example.
I went to the Saturn web site and selected the Find a Retailer link:
Suggestion: Write your web site text the way that real people use words. Have you ever heard of a Car Retailer? Probably not -- it's a Car Dealer.
This took me to a search screen:
I filled in "Medford" and chose Massachusetts as the state. Now I know for a fact that there is a Saturn dealer in Medford, Massachusetts so I was expecting to get only this one result. So I was quite pleasantly surprised when I got this instead:
That's right -- three results. These are (I think though I'm not sure) the closest dealers to Medford. Now I was wondering if there were only three Saturn dealers in Massachusetts so I just searched for Massachusetts and got this:
There are clearly a lot more than three Saturn dealers in Massachusetts.
This was a nice implementation of Over Searching. What they did was correctly recognize that a person, even if they are highly specific in their search query, might benefit from knowing about more than just that one search result. If you think about it, it makes sense:
- They could have a bad experience with a dealer and want another option
- It tells them where they can get service even if their original dealer is busy
- It gives the customer a "warm and fuzzy" feeling that there is more than one dealership if they need it
- It provides them with another option
Nicely done! Kudos to Saturn for this one.