Buy4Now and Komplett - in search of a good search

— Published January 24th, 2007  |  by David Moore

You walk into a shop, have a quick look around, but don’t see what you’re after. So you ask someone. Pretty obvious really.

The online equivalent of this process is the site’s search feature, which should be clever enough to help you even if you’re not sure how to describe what you’re looking for.

According to the usability consultants and web application developers 37signals, there are some solid ways to tell if a search is performing well:

1. Are the search results at this site accurate and relevant?
2. If I misspell a search term, does the site know what I mean and provide useful results?
3. Can I sort the search results by price, brand, availability, and/or other useful criteria?
4. Will the site find related words and common synonyms for terms I use in my search (e.g. “soda� and “pop�)?
5. Can I search using mixed specifications such as gender, color, etc. (e.g. Will a search for “red wool men’s sweater� show me red wool men’s sweaters?)?
6. What happens if the site returns no results? Will it help me or provide tips?

With these in mind, let’s look at two major Irish retail sites – Buy4Now and Komplett, and see how they perform.

1) Relevant and accurate search results

We used the search feature to find something we knew was there. Buy4Now stumbled badly here – a search with “Crystal Glass� for a Tipperary Crystal Patrick Guilbaud Burgundy Red Wine Glass Gift Box produced only one (wrong) result – a glass shelf.

Over at the computer store Komplett, a ‘universal adapter’ search looking for a ‘Fortron/Source Universal Notebook AC Adapter 90W’ brought up the item (and several others) with no bother. Score that one for Komplett.

2) Misspelt search term

We tried ‘crystel’ for ‘crystal’, with no results. Komplett was stumped by ‘adaptor’ for ‘adapter’ – looks like you better get your spelling right with these sites.

3) Searching by criteria

Buy4Now lets you search by store, but not by any other criteria. One simple way to improve things would be allow filtering by the categories they already use for browsing. Komplett doesn’t offer search filtering either, but it does show a selection of alternative or related searches which might prove useful.

4) Synonyms and related terms

Buy4Now doesn’t recognise ‘stemware’ for glasses, or ‘penknife’ for army knife. As we saw, Komplett suggests related searches, so you can narrow ‘adapter’ down to USB, power, scart, VGA and others. But these seem computer generated (based on other people’s searches), not human generated, so they’re of questionable use sometimes. And typing in ‘Mac’ doesn’t bring up any of the Apple computers they sell.

5) Mixed specifications

Here both sites do a little better, ‘rugby jersey’ produces good results on Buy4Now, and ‘USB cable’ narrows things down nicely on Komplett. But enter too many search terms on Buy4Now, and it starts to creak – several of the results for ‘rugby jersey’ were for Ireland jerseys. But search for ‘rugby jersey ireland’ inexplicably shows no results. Komplett handles USB 2.0 cable, though.

6) What if no results?

Buy4Now gives a link to a browsable set of categories, a 1890 phone number and a list of popular searches, while Komplett gives some search tips, which is also moderately helpful. Both could also include some other options: for example, including a search box (perhaps with advanced options) gives people the chance to try again.

Compare and Contrast

As an example of how to do things better, US clothing retailer Lands End offers a very forgiving and flexible search, with lots of features.

It’s an obvious point, but one that Komplett and Buy4Now seem to have forgotten – it’s no use having a huge online inventory if people can’t find what they’re looking for.