Breaking Search For Fun and Profit
Session Abstract
With a little experience it’s easy to find site search queries that don’t work. With live examples picked from a variety of high-profile websites, I’ll show you how to easily break search – and discuss what we mean by ‘broken’, the different kinds of failure and what they reveal about the underlying search engine and how we might improve it.
Session Description
Even the most sophisticated search system will fail in some cases – we simply can’t predict all the possible queries the user might try, what they are actually trying to achieve and how they might express their needs. Let’s try together to break search on a number of well-known websites – but not just for fun! There are different kinds of ‘broken’ – zero result searches, irrelevant results, system errors – we’ll describe each of these and show examples, creating a classification system for search failures. We’ll then talk about what underlying issues with search we might be able to reveal and how they could be fixed to improve overall search quality.
