Pro­gres­sive Search

Today, I added a basic weighted search to this site. You can find it here and in the footer below. Providing a search functionality is one of the pillars of an IndieWeb site, mainly because it offers improved access to the content you create and own on your site. But: Search on personal and corporate sites is a somewhat difficult topic. On the one hand, offering search more or less is imperative, but on the other hand, it is hard to get right. Most users are used to the comfort of those insanely accurate search results of Google's sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms. Of course, this is something a normal website hardly can compete with. Nevertheless, you have to find ways to provide a sufficient search experience to your users.

For now, my site uses the standard search of Craft CMS, improved by a weighted search plugin. This is a solid start but I want to find ways to gradually improve the search experience for visitors of my site. If you look at what makes a good website search, things to consider include:

• relevant search results
• providing a good “no results” page with a path forward
• suggesting synonyms and alternative terms
• recognizing typos and misspellings and offering guidance
• autocomplete for search terms
• using a stop word list
• displaying search results by category
• faceted search or filters

This list is by no means complete and probably I won't be able to implement all of those points. My goal is a convenient search that optimally supports the content of a personal site, offers accurate results presented in a useful and usable form, and is as fault tolerant as possible regarding user input. Or, as John Postel said:

“Be conservative in what you send. Be liberal in what you accept”

So I will take this core functionality and, focussing on the most effective design decisions, enhance it. Bit by bit. Progressively.

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