Browsing through a website can sometimes feel like wandering through a supermarket: if you’re not familiar with it, it can take forever to find that sesame seed oil that’s on your shopping list for tonight’s dinner party. You know the information you’re looking for is there, but finding it can take forever.
Unlike the supermarket, at least websites have search. But your good old search bar, while practical and long-standing, often delivers a bunch of links to anything related to your keywords – not to mention anything related to your intent. This article delves into the current state of website search, its shortcomings, and the need for a more efficient solution.
Traditional Search Technologies: The Issues with Keyword Search
The basis of traditional search technologies rests on keyword search. This is a simple concept: the user enters a keyword or a set of keywords, and the search engine retrieves the content that contains these keywords. But the simplicity of keyword search can also be its downfall.
- Keyword search requires the user to know the right keywords ahead of time. However, not all users are certain of what exactly they’re looking for, and more importantly, they may not know the exact terminology or jargon used on a website. As a result, they might not be able to formulate the “right” search query to find the desired information.
- Keyword search tends to hurl at the user a large number of results, some of them multiple years old and completely out of date, without discerning the relevance or intent behind the user’s query. This is especially true for websites with events listed on them, such as schools, museums, conference producers, trade unions… It’s also true for tech companies that write about their successive release, with evolving system requirements and feature sets.
Consequently, it’s up to the user to sift through a mountain of ill-presented information (blue links were cool 25 years ago) to find what they need, which can be time-consuming and frustrating – not to mention impossible with a screen reader. The search engine may retrieve hundreds or even thousands of results, leaving the user to figure out which result is the most pertinent.
Because this experience sucks, many websites have stopped incorporating a search bar altogether. Others keep a search bar but no-one ever uses it.
The Decline of the Website Search Bar
That search sucks is a significant loss for both users and website owners. Users are frustrated and may miss out on important content that could answer their queries or meet their needs. Website owners spend resources creating content only to lose the opportunity to engage visitors with their content, potentially leading to decreased site engagement and conversions.
If you add to that the fact that content on websites is scattered across different formats like pages, blog posts, social media posts, multimedia content, podcasts, you know why users turn to chatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI mode. But if they don’t come to your website anymore, you might as well roll down the curtain one last time.
The Need for a New Approach
Clearly, there’s a need for a more intelligent, intuitive website navigation. Websites should provide an experience that’s better than what AI portals provide, if they want to remain relevant and useful.
So, what would an ideal search solution look like? Uses love chatGPT, so that’s the basic experience they expect on your website too. But not a chatGPT with a knowledge cut-off of years ago. One that is the most up to date on your stuff than anyone. The total expert of your content.
Users shouldn’t be required to know your jargon or read a data dump of links from your inspiration years ago. It’s the other way around: you should understand them. You should adapt your language to theirs and map their intent to your content.
There are plenty of options to choose from. We’ll cover in another post the numerous chatbots out there.
When choosing a chatbot, keep in mind the most important aspect: how much effort you want to put into curating it. One thing the keyword search tools does well is automating the whole process: you don’t have to do any work (of course the user ends up doing most of the work sorting through the mess it returns – but not you).
It’s the same for chatbots. Think about all the junk you’ve accumulated in your garage over the years – now picture your website. Hundreds, thousands of pages no-one has ever bothered to remove. Who’s going to tell your bot which ones to keep or not? I’ll give you a spoiler: Rozz is great at that.
It’s time to move on. Websites need their own AI chatbot or they will be bypassed by AI platforms – or die of irrelevance and user frustration. Google search used to send visitors to websites as fast as they could. Times have changed, and now Google want to keep those eyeballs on their own property. Do YOU want that? The future of the web is in play right now. Take it into your own hands.
Enter Rozz.