How many times have you found a product you want to buy in Google, only to find it's a 2-week-expired eBay listing? Or wanted to find an item with an online store's search facility only to find that it lists only stale, unread news articles?
Gone are the days of business card or brochure sized websites, every ma-and-pa business wants an eCommerce website and a CMS backend so they can continue to add products and modify content on a daily basis. The result is a large, informative and dynamic website with to-the-minute information and data. And while this generation of website is a huge step forward from the old-school static websites, there is one main drawback;
How does a surfer or even a search facility find needed information when the content changes everyday?
As websites grow with their companies, so do their FAQ listings, their product lists, etc. They become far too cumbersome for a surfer to browse through and the search site facilities respond to any search with pages of unrelated hits. The end results are frustrated customers, swamped sales support staff, and a high turnover of surfers.
The solution of course is to have smarter search facilities. A bot that knows where to look in the database for certain information and makes the necessary queries. A module that checks the current state of the site's data when the search is taking place. A web app that has every frequently asked question under its belt, and can notify staff if it's missing one that customers want to know. And on top of all that it has to know what it's looking for from a simple, plain English question typed by the customer.
I call any belonging to this new generation of search facilities a "lazy-faq". The users can be lazy because they can type a simple question rather than trawling through the site, and the search bot is lazy because it doesn't fetch any data until the very moment it is requested by the user. Next generation website search modules know where to go to find the price of the fluffy toilet seat cover you want, can reply to the question you're trying to ask about the size of their imitation Mona Lisas, and are happy to tell you the store's business hours when you ask if they'll be open at 3am on Sunday. And all of these responses are in plain English, and using 100% current data.
The question entry box usually "lives" on a side panel of the website and because the system knows more specifically what you are asking about, it can reply in a few short sentences inside that box (without the page refreshing). This makes the search feature far less obtrusive than a search results page, and allows the user to quickly find information without disrupting their navigation.
"Lazy-faq" technology is well overdue in the current climate of super-dynamic web based internet and is being quickly adapted by many of the largest technology companies as a way to help their customers find what they want from a truly mammoth website. Soon the rest of the internet will follow suite and you can expect to see this next-gen search functionality as a standard fixture of all commercial websites in the very near future.
Written by Matthew Rietdijk