Sometimes, I’m annoyed by the simplest things. Like using the on-site search at a particular website and not finding a product I know they have. That irritates me beyond all reason.

So, typing ‘fruited tea cakes’ into Tesco.com’s own search engine and getting results for tea bags has inspired this blog post.

You see, I know Tesco sells tea cakes with bits of fruit in them. I buy them often. What I didn’t expect was that I would have to match the exact spelling Tesco themselves use (which turns out to be ‘fruit teacakes’) in order to find the product. Surely, they have a web team that looks at how people use their on-site search engine and adapt it accordingly? No? I guess not.

Poorly designed on-site search engines have been a bugbear of mine for years. It is up to the website themselves to understand the language real people might use to search for their products. That way, if I search for ‘fruited tea cakes’ and get no results, I’m not going to go to one of their competitors for my teacake related needs.

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg over at GrokDotCom have long suggested that, if you can’t get your on-site search to function in accordance with the needs of your visitors, you would be better off scrapping it altogether. I can see their point, but done right, it is a useful tool for visitors.

However, website owners must be able to get access to a list of the queries users are typing in and must be able to adapt the results to shown to take into account the language their visitors actually use. Otherwise, frankly, what’s the point?

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