1. Do It
Yourself
Site Search
Evaluation

2. The Unbxd Cheat Sheet
 Auto-complete  Searching category and
sub-category names
 Single word Spellcheck
 Phonetic search
 Double word Spellcheck
 Contextual search
 Spell correction
 Weighted terms
 Stemming, single vs.
Plural  Spatial searching
 Stemming, tenses  Synonym matching

3. Auto-complete
 Shorten purchase
cycles
 Suggest up-sell, cross-
sell products in drop-
down box
 Encourage searching
for specific products,
which improves the
relevance of search
results.

4. Single Word Spellcheck
 Shorten purchase cycles by suggesting corrections.
 Reduce chances of a lost sale due to
mis-spelled search query.
 Improve user experience

5. Double Word Spellcheck
 Enhance user experience for more than one word
typed by the visitor.

6. Stemming: Singular Vs. Plural
 Results must be the same for
singular and plural queries.
 Eg. Run versus Running, when
searching for shoes.
 Must provide uniform results
for both types of queries when
visitors think differently.
 Extremely important for
promotions :- merchandiser
may run campaign against run
but not running.

7. Stemming: Tenses
 Must provide uniform results for past and present
tense queries.
 For eg. Stripe T-shirt Vs. Striped T-shirt
 Motivated by same reasons, mainly.
 i.e. Promotions effectiveness and better user
experience.

8. Category Matching
 Visitors search for categories, sub-
categories and store names.
 These names are not always
present in each product or SKU.
 Must still display the contents of
each category/sub-category or
store.
 Do you display contents of the
exact category or only those
products which contain category
name in the description?

9. Category Relevance
 Visitors search for generic
queries.
 There may be multiple stores in
which the query matches.
 Do you know which store or
category is most relevant for
the query?
 Do you simply display the
store/category with most
results?
 Must show the most relevant

10. Phonetic Spellcheck
 Visitors make very obvious
spell mistakes.
 Phonetic spell check ensures
that similar sounding words are
more important than other
words when correcting a spell-
mistake.
 Does your search correct
“jeens” to “jeans” or something
else?
 Does your search correct
“nokea” to “nokia”?

11. Contextual Search
 Humans think about products in a particular way.
 “I want watches less than 5000”
 “Are there hotels around airport in Sydney?”
 Search must understand the context of the naturally
expressed keywords.
 Allow visitors to search for attributes like price
ranges, brand names, etc.

12. Weighted Terms
 Let’s say visitors
search for “brown
leather jackets”.
 What does your search
display if there are no
brown leather jackets
but there are brown
shoes and leather
jackets?
 Does the search understand that “jackets” is the key
term here and not “brown” and “leather”?
 Understanding the relative importance of words in a
search query is important.

13. Spatial Search
 Visitors on travel sites look for
proximity to landmarks.
 Search needs to understand
distances and proximity.
 Can you search for distances
from landmarks?
 Can you search for travel time
from landmarks?

14. Synonym Matching
 Visitors use some words interchangeably.
 Cellphones are the same as Mobiles.
 Does your search know that it needs to present
same results for both searches?
 Is there a simple way for you to create more such
relationships between words?

15. These are just a
few of the tests
we perform.

16. Register @
http://unbxd.com
for Unbxd Search
Private Beta.

17. Cover Image by philenthropist/Flickr
Stemming image by Cooking For Geeks/Flickr
Gramophone image By Ludmiła Pilecka (Own work)
[GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Balance scale by Sepehr Ehsani/Flickr
Radar image by Morning Calm News/Flickr