In search of ... search customer experience

If you don't think customer experience design for online merits high strategic priority, the people who want to lead the buildout of Internet local search have a thing or two to tell you.

Those people would be bigwigs at Google, Yahoo!, America Online, BellSouth, Verizon, AskJeeves and Dex Media -- companies that, without exception, count on the perceptions and loyalty of two customer sets: consumers and advertisers.

Belo Interactive sent me to hear executives from those companies and many more at last week's Kelsey Group conference, Drilling Down on Local Search, in Santa Clara, Calif. I singled out those seven because their executives stocked the last panel of the last day, in which they were charged with forecasting local search business trends for the next 12 months.

As it has with the emerging (reemerging?) buzz around local search, Google set the tone for the panel. Specifically, Sukhinder Singh, Google's general manager/local, postulated:

• Local search isn't just about finding businesses near a specific location. It's about finding parks, schools, community information and things to see and do.
• Local search should start from the simplest search form that can bring in results from the broadest possible data sets. That means search services need access to ever broader content.
• The major players will cut deals with each other to a point where they all have access to the same databases -- and at that point the key differentiator will be customer experience.

And they all nodded. Let me just go over that again: These huge Internet players agree that customer experience will be the key differentiator on which they stake their businesses once they're all pointing their searches to like data.

A Google person can say that with some confidence. Google's reputation remains quite good among consumers for the perceived quality of search results. The incumbent Yellow Pages companies? Well, they seem to recognize the challenges they face in customer experience.

"The search guys have taught directory people about the value of unstructured search input," said Francis Barker, senior vice president of strategy, Dex Media. "But the directory guys have taught the search people what users want for output, which is more structure."

Maybe. But immaculately structured search results don't help if the data don't meet consumers' expectations. An information architect can generate meaningful matches with some confidence if the search query itself carries structured attributes. But even the smartest algorithms on top of the broadest databases can misfire when they try to guess human intent from unstructured queries.

Several months ago, for example, I wrote an unimportant Weblog item about my experiences trying out Netscape 7.1 for e-mail. That item remains the most commented-on entry in the entire blog -- not because I stirred up controversy, but because people started posting technical questions about the Netscape mail client and others started posting answers.

In the site referrer logs, I still get at least a few page views every day on that item. My logs show me what terms people used to find the page, and on what search engine. The fact that they're clicking through to this thoroughly out-of-date and mostly unhelpful entry tells me two things:

1. Netscape 7.1 technical support on the Netscape site, or anywhere else on the Web, must be pitifully incomplete.
2. The search engines are promoting bad results in absence of good ones.

One of those searches, on Google, used the query string "netscape mail junk controls do not turn on." My blog item says nothing about this problem -- in fact, it reports my early observations that junk mail controls in the program appeared to work very well.

But it appears No. 3 on the list when you run this query on Google. And it's surrounded by other items that offer no more help to this poor searcher than I did.

Google's algorithms cannot fathom what this person truly sought: help with a software glitch. The unfeeling ignorance of the search program cannot be considered good customer experience, yet Google's the site that people cite almost religiously as their favorite for search.

You see the design dilemma here: people state and demonstrate preferences for free-form, simple, unstructured Web searches. That lack of structure -- especially if specific, properly formed keywords are not used -- greatly reduces the likelihood the match results will meet their needs.

So now, 10 years into this whole Web thing, consumer expectations run so low that Google, which has the best perceived match quality but not necessarily good match quality, nevertheless earns tremendous loyalty.

Meanwhile, online Yellow Pages-type directories, such as Verizon SuperPages, count even more on consumers' abilities to precategorize their searches. If you know the name of the business you're trying to find, or the category of business in which you wish to find a choice of merchants, online Yellow Pages work fine.

But business directories can't answer a technical question, of course. And even if a business listing is what you're after, how do you know the first screen contains the best matches for your needs?

You don't. You know only that it contains the closest businesses, or the ones that paid most to be at the top of that page of results. Remember, quality of match is all about perception: did the results meet your needs?

Oh, baby, Web search -- local or otherwise -- still has so far to go. This category alone should keep designers, information architects and all other forms of customer experience specialists in nice cars and protein-rich diets for many years.