Noise is not just a loud or unpleasant sound that causes a disturbance. The same can be true with information. Noise plays a big role in preventing conversion. In the case of search, it causes problems with click through rates in search results.
Examples of how noise will impact search results include:
- Vague queries
- Irrelevant search results
- Page after page of search results
Noise is a symptom of a problem, how big or small it is depends on how you’re looking after your search results.
Vague queries
Vague queries lack specific meaning. They return lots of possible results but often aren't relevant. This means the person searching would have multiple pages of results. As it’s very hard to identify the person's intent, it’s hard to create relevant results.
Vague queries are hard to get rid of entirely, and are to be expected in some cases.
You can curate your results if your search analytics shows you what results your visitors are picking. This would be a way around the problem.
Irrelevant search results
This is closely related to vague queries, however it’s where the search results return results for a specific query but they don’t in any way match the search query.
These are likely to occur, however, if you’re maintaining your search results the risk of these being the dominant search results should not be a problem.
If irrelevant search results are all you’re currently getting then it’s time to get your search engine under control.
To prevent noise caused by irrelevant search results the following needs to be understood:
- What are your visitors searching for?
- What results are they getting?
- What are they clicking on?
- What is their intent?
Page after page of search results
If you've got a very large search index, you will probably get multi-page results. This can happen even after you've done what you can to mitigate vague queries.
This level of noise will mean visitors will do one of two things. First they'll try to narrow their search. Second, they'll second guess themselves.
Second guessing will look like picking something they aren't confident matches their query.
The thing is, what they really need could be on the third or fourth page of results.
Your visitors will rarely want to search beyond the second page, at a push.
The more searches that have multiple pages of results, the more it impacts the trust your visitors have with your search engine.
Less is more.
