Protect Your Site from Brand-Negative Search
Part 3: Avoid the Pitfalls of General Search

In an effort to enhance the overall user experience, Web sites add search bars to their sites. A well designed search capability can keep visitors on the Web site; surfing through content and exposing them to advertising messages. But simply adding a search capability is no guarantee of success.

In part 1 of this series, we used SportsIllustrated.com’s (SI.com) search functionality as an example. Looking for another way to improve the user experience, SI.com features a Google “enhanced” toolbar – Web and site search combined; a well-intentioned move with brand-negative results: The “enhanced” search generated links to SI’s competitors, and site searches can actually drive users away by returning “no results found” for common search criteria such as “college football.”

The Troubles with General Search Engine Technology
SI.com, like most commercial Web sites, makes money by attracting visitors to their interesting content and then selling banner ads, skyscraper ads, and newsletter sponsorships to advertisers. General search engines make money through paid placements within their search results. The two are in conflict.

At SI.com, the default behavior for the Google search bar is a search on “the Web” not “SI.com.” After each search, the search bar behavior gets reset to searching “the Web”. In short, Google makes certain that its paid placements receive priority over the interests of SI.com.

Relevancy
The demand for relevancy on special interest Web sites is very high. When users perform a search on a general search engine site like Google or Yahoo, they expect to see a few relevant results and hundreds of thousands of irrelevant ones. But when those same users perform a search on a site dedicated to their topic of interest, they expect all the results to be relevant.

General search engines simply don’t have the ability to filter their results sufficiently to meet this high demand for relevancy on special interest Web sites.

The Solution
In order to enhance the user experience and generate revenue for a special interest Web site, a search solution must do four things seamlessly:

1) It must provide a mechanism to display non-competitive paid placements the special interest Web site can use to generate revenue.

2) It must keep users on the site by producing relevant search results from the local pages.

3) It must ensure that results are presented on every search; even if there is no relevant local content to satisfy the search terms.

4) During Web searches, it must filter results from other sites to prevent sending users to a competing site.

By meeting these criteria, a Web site can generate revenue through paid placements and offer users relevant content; first from within their site, then from other sites.

General search solutions fail three of the four criteria. But flexible specialized search engines can remedy the brand-negative pitfalls of general search. Consider testing a specialized site search engine which fulfills all four of the above objectives and protects your brand by improving the customer experience.

Get to know your company’s search engine better: search like your customers search – what do you find? Use those experiences to optimize the search experience for your users by eliminating “no results found,” competition, tweaking results and providing valuable content whenever possible.