Optimal Usability Increases Search Traffic and Clicks

A user-friendly search-engine generates search traffic and advertising revenue. Experience shows that adding approximate search features like SearchNavigator and MatchMaker Search may increase overall page views by 5% to 12%. A directory that makes it easy to find the correct results attracts more users and advertisers. Directory Search Maps

How user-friendly is your search engine?

Your users have high expectations for online search. Advanced web search and local search like Google have made search users more sophisticated. Users only search online when they are confident they will find what they are looking for. In a directory they expect every query to return the right result.

What's your percentage of zero/no result query?
How many misspelled queries do your users submit?
How many users drop out of your site before getting to an actual listing or clicking on an advertisers' content?

Product names, company names, addresses, categories can be hard to spell ("58 Hirizodh Lane", "Portland 97008-6389", "Hewlett Packard", "LaserJet DeskJet 970cx i", "Sauerbraten Restaurant"), there are many synonyms for categorical headings (auto, automotive, vehicles, cars), and users need and expect suggestions for close matches based on spelling or categorical relationships.

If on average 15-25% of all queries are misspelled or do not exactly match the directory records, as many as 50% of users may have experienced dissatisfaction with your key application: Search. "Please refine your search query" is no answer for that.

For these reasons a search engine must be able to handle incorrect spellings, British vs. American spelling, multiple languages, word fractions, word swaps, phonetic spellings, singular/plural, synonyms, aliases, related queries, related categories, and typos. Does this sound complex and costly to implement? Does it sound likely to slow down your search engine? Read on.

Advanced Fuzzy Search

A powerful search solution like Exorbyte’s fuzzy MatchMaker Search uses advanced algorithms, phonetics, and indexing techniques to widen the search corridor of exact search. The user receives helpful results for every query.

Ultra-Fast

MatchMaker Search is ultra-fast: MatchMaker was built especially to return highly customized results within 10 milliseconds even across many millions of records. But is speed sufficient? Read on.

Optimal Web 2.0 Usability

SearchNavigator provides fast "type ahead" or "auto suggest" AJAX search user interface to help users formulate their favorite queries right from your full directory data. Only MatchMaker can offer such a functionality without slowing down your servers across many millions of records.

Synonym Dictionaries

The search performance of MatchMaker Search can be further enhanced by the addition of alias dictionaries. Exorbyte offers a powerful software tool to develop alias lists directly from your search query logs.

Address Detection and Geo-Search

For the classic What / Where search, Exorbyte offers an address-detection module that helps to return the correct Where-relation. It doesn’t matter whether the user types: “DC Washingon 20008” or “20008 Waschington”, MatchMaker Search makes sense of both. Additionally MatchMaker Search allows special handling of geocodes contained in its index for radius search and sorting by distance. Perfect for integration with maps.

Implementation without Database Integration

MatchMaker Search can be deployed on top of the existing data infrastructure. This allows the usage of low-cost hardware, minimal changes to the existing IT-infrastructure and database independence. The implementation is fast and simple and can be completed within a few days. The architecture guarantees full scalability and a dramatically reduced database load.