Provide clear feedback
If a visitor uses the search feature he expects clear feedback. Put
a sentence at the top of each page saying how many results the
user's query produced. Repeating the query in that sentence is very
important. If you don't repeat the query, the user might not notice
he's made a spelling mistake, for example. He'll blame the 0 results
on you and leave your site in a huff.
Repeat the query in the search box
Besides including the query in the feedback sentence it's also a
good idea to repeat (or actually, leave) the query in the search box
on the results pages. That way, a user can easily correct a spelling
mistake or refine his query without having to type in the whole
query again.
Use informative page titles
Provide the page title and a short description of maximum 3 lines of
each result. Make sure the page title actually says something about
the content of the page or the document. Only if you provide useful
information will users find what they're looking for fast. Good page
titles aren't just important for your site search, they're also
important if you want to be found by the big search engines. (Read
our article on title-tags for more info.) A
separate line containing the url of the page isn't really necessary,
unless you're a portal site and your search covers several web
sites. If you do provide the url, make sure it's clickable. Put the
page title, the short description and the url underneath each other
and clearly separate the different results on the page
Put the most relevant results first
A lot of people don't look past the first page of results so order
results based on relevance to the query. The result that matches the
query best should be first. Don't use stars or percentages to
indicate relevance. Users expect the order of the results to be a
reflection of their relevance.
Get rid of dead weight
On most sites it really doesn't matter when a page from the results
list was made, who made it or how heavy it is. Anything that doesn't
contribute to a clear understanding of the content of the page is
dead weight and should be eliminated.
Number of results and results pages
Limit the number of results per page to 10 or 15 if you want users
to be able to have a good overview of your results pages. If you
have more than one results page, use a clickable overview of the
number of results pages at the bottom of each results page.
All numbers have to be clickable, except of course the page the
user is on. That way, users can go from one results page to another
without being forced to look at all the pages in between.
