Search: E-Commerce Design Patterns

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Related Design Patterns:
Presenting the search-box, Making search work effectively , The search results page.

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Problem Summary

The customer attempts to find something specific on your e-commerce site (usually a product) using keyword search.
Note this is about on-site search, not web searching (e.g. using Google).

Search is a design pattern cluster - there are 3 specific design patterns involved in getting search right:

Presenting the search-box: enabling customers to enter keywords and initiate search. Key issues for this design pattern include visual prominence and consistency, text-box size, auto-suggest, auto-focus, indicating search scope and search button labelling.
Making search work effectively: key issues in search indexing and search engine tuning to achieve high search fidelity, low search redundancy and high search tolerance.
The search results page: Enabling customers to make sense of the search results and move towards a purchase decision.

Author: Mike Baxter | Last modified: 5th June 2006