Forum Moderators: bakedjake
I am now taking care of a huge website (30k pages) and we are having issues with people not finding what they are looking for and going away. Actually, using Google with site: has more relevant than using our own search engine, wich is a little embarassing.
A lot of those pages are either not well tagged (META) or not tagged at all. We averaged to months the time needed to get this fixed.
My point of view is that this is the first thing we should do, but other options are brought to the table like implementing a Natural Search Engine.
Seems to me that there are a lot of limitations in a Natural Search Engine. First, it will only send people to pages when you will have "teached" him to do so. And for users that are writing weird questions, or are using unfamiliar terms, then it will just not find anything... so you have to still get a search engine with a spider/crawler to have all of your content available. Third, it needs a lot of maintenance to always keep the information relevant and not sending the user to dead pages.
The solution I have, for trying to "patch" the actual solution, is ot implement the "keyword" search, a little like paid ads in search engine. User searches for "blue widget", there is an entry for "widget", show the user this link first, then the results. But this will bring us to maintain this database as well.
Did some of you went to this kind of problem and how did you resolved this problem? Are there some tool that can help one to tag en entire site without having to go through each page manually?
TIA.
You are mixing two things up. On the one hand you want a "classical" site search, where your users put a keyword in a box and do a query. On the other hand you want some humand based help for your users. For classical search solutions, there are programs like Lucene or htdig.
Once such a keyword search is working on your website, offering some guidance is of course a good idea. You should list your most queried terms and offer for each of them some hand picked results.
How busy is your site? 'query per minute' - what is your expected / hopeful peak and how soon will you get there?
Do you have a URL to check out?
