The right site search solution depends on what your visitors actually want — and whether your content is ready to support it. Here's how to decide.
We’re working on two low-stakes house projects right now — replacing a toilet, and adding new blinds to our patio door. Which means we need: a toilet, and some blinds.
One of these was simple. I went to Lowe’s and I asked where the toilets were. They pointed me to the toilets, and I picked out a toilet. I knew what I wanted, but I needed to know how to get there.
The second was more complex. We needed to walk through options — styles, cost, installation — so we had a conversation with someone who specializes in banded blinds. We gathered information on how to install them, what models worked best, and even how much they might weigh. We left with information that we then used to make a decision a few days later.
Both of these could have gone differently. If I’d asked where the toilets were and the Lowe’s employee didn’t know where they were, or if they were placed in the wrong aisle, I’d be very frustrated. Likewise, if I’d encountered an employee with no understanding of the ins-and-outs of banded blinds, I’d be left with mixed messages and less certainty.
I am a human, who was searching for things, so I talked to other humans. But this is essentially how site search works. We have different options for how to handle and improve our on-site search, and not every method works for every search. Let’s jump in and spell it out.
Understanding the reason behind site search.
There’s a common assumption that fixing site search means finding a new tool. This is what every vendor would like you to believe — that a plug-in or content management system (CMS) add-on is all you need to make search work a lot better.
In most cases, this is half true. The tooling matters, very much! There are certain features and common functionality that helps improve the usability and maintenance of site search. But site search is only as good as the content it's searching — and the way that content is structured, indexed, and ranked. Which means fixing site search is a question of what’s wrong with site search in the first place.
To understand this, we need to know what visitors want.
The reflex to treat site search as a shopping decision skips our understanding of how visitors are using our site search. Before you compare tools, you have to know what expectations are present around the search box. Different situations need different tools.
It can be as simple as answering two questions:
- Do your visitors already know what they want, or are they asking open questions?
- Do your visitors need to land on a page, or do they need an answer or to finish a task?
The answer isn’t a clean decision for any site. For example, a person looking for the undergraduate admissions application isn’t asking for a chat or researching an issue — they are looking for a specific thing that lives in a specific place. On the other hand, a future student wondering which programs fit their specific situation wants an answer that pulls from several pages. These are different jobs, and the tool that serves one can be the wrong tool for the other.
No one is happy with an “It Depends” answer, so do your own research — sort your internal search traffic against these two questions and determine which is most likely for your site.
When better site search is the right move.
Good site search is complex. It is complex because we expect more out of it than we end up getting. We have spent a decade using advanced search tools like Google, which clouds our thoughts on on-site search — we expect Google-like results, despite not having Google-like resources.
Traditional site search is primarily a retrieval service: it finds and ranks the pieces of content or records that best match a query. Modern search can go well beyond exact keyword matching, using synonyms, semantic ranking, vector search, and other techniques to understand what a visitor means. But the core goal of traditional site search is to search for a page you know is there and then go to the page you know is there.
For this kind of work, an AI assistant may be unnecessary. Instead, you need a search tool that has been tuned for the words that people use. This means synonyms, and “elevated” results tied to unique terms, and filters that match how people narrow down results. This might even mean federated search if your content lives across multiple sites.
This is also relatively simple to understand, because it depends on using the right terms. The downside of traditional site search is also that it depends on using the right terms. The first time you visit a banking site, you probably assume there’s a page for checking accounts. The first time you visit a hospital site, you probably assume there’s a page with parking maps. This is where the frustration can set in — your assumption might not match the reality, for a few reasons:
- If the page is not there, it cannot be surfaced.
- If the page uses a term different from what you typed, it might not be surfaced.
- If the answer is trapped inside a PDF or buried in a page about something else, it might not be surfaced.
- If the page is present, but out of date, search will surface it anyway — wrong information and all.
Traditional site search is an unglamorous option, but it’s often a more affordable option and, if your site is not content rich or complex, it’s also a more sensible option.
