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What are the implications of full-text search from the perspective of Web-site design?
This became clear to me from my own little site, back around the time when AltaVista first came out. In the fall of 1995, there were some other search engines out there that were already heading in this same general direction. On Halloween day, I went to a tele-seminar about the Internet. It was given by a couple friends of mine who are professors at the Harvard Business School. Being professors, they had to explain everything in terms of the whole history of mankind. They were trying to talk about how to make a successful business on the Web. And they took, as an example, Virtual Vineyards, which sells premium wines on the Web.
Their analysis of Virtual Vineyards was that, first, they don't own the infrastructure -- that's the Internet and that's available to anybody. Second, they don't own the product, because you could go down to the corner store and buy the same bottle of wine. So what is it that differentiates them? What makes this a successsful business?
Their conclusion was -- the context of the user's experience. Then they showed a videotape with the people who had designed the Web pages and ran the business. They talked very proudly about why they put this button here and that one there. And the way they described it felt to me like a branching adventure story, where you are going down a long hallway and are you going to open the door here? or the door there? And are you going to fight the dragon or run for the hills? And it's a very long hallway, and after maybe 20 choices, then you are going to decide which wine you want to buy.
Now, just around that same time, I had a little article on my Web site about Halloween. This was something I had written about 20 years before, that had never been published. (I put everything on my Web site.) Suddenly, around Halloween time, I was getting three times as many hits on that article as I was on my home page. So it was beginning to dawn on me that something was happening. People weren't going through the front door. When you have full-text search engines, people can come in anywhere -- any page at your site is a potential entry point. There is nothing special about a home page. All pages are created equal, as far as search engines are concerned. And when most traffic is driven by search engines, don't waste all that time on a home page. Pay attention to each and every individual page.
So when I heard them talking about how they had designed Virtual Vineyards, I thought, "They are in trouble." Because all of a sudden, they didn't have control of that context anymore. People could come in through the windows or the back door and go anywhere.
There are still some instances today, but there were many back then, of Web sites that were designed like the old Burma Shave ads (if you're old enough to remember those). You'd drive along the highway and there would be a series of about a dozen signs, and there would be just a couple words on each, and there were about a hundred yards apart, and there was a really good punchline when you got to the end. Well, doing a search at AltaVista, I would suddenly be reading the seventh sign, and I wouldn't have a clue what the context was, or where to go to next, or what was going on. It was totally bizarre.
So if you have a Web site, what do you do in this environment?
Naturally, you need to provide navigation buttons on every page.
My basic design principle is "maximum content for minimum clicks." I don't want people to have to click 20 times to come to a decision. It shouldn't take more than three clicks -- two is even better -- to go from anywhere at a Web site to any other page at that same site. Keep it easy. Remember, it's easy for your visitors to click on a bookmark to go back to a search engine and go anywhere else they want on the Web. At any moment, there are thousands of competing pages out there. I want to give them the information they need fast, rather than wait for them to get frustrated.
Another interesting little trick -- you can do a search for host: followed by a domain name (like host:samizdat.com) to see ever page from a particular Web site that is in the index. If I have been rigorous and every time I add a new Web page or make a significant change to a Web page, I go to AltaVista and ADD URL; then I can use AltaVista as a free index of my site.
This dawned on me when people were coming to me and saying, "You have a lot of good stuff at your site, but it's just too complicated. There are so many things there. Can't you put some search software on your site." Well, I didn't want to spend any money on that. I didn't want to have to think of key words. I didn't want to have to go through all the maintenance problems when you are running your own separate search engine at your site. But AltaVista indexes it all automatically for me now.
First, I did it the simplest way. I made a hyperlink at my site. "Click here to launch a search at AltaVista and to search for only pages at this site. Just add your query after what you see there in the box." They'd click, get to AltaVista, and the query +host:samizdat.com would already be in the box. (The URL I linked to was a unique URL generated by doing a search at AltaVista for +host:samizdat.com. I simply did a cut and paste to make a hyperlink to that at my site.)
Later, somebody who had seen my site sent me a neat piece of code that let me do this using forms. So today it looks a bit more sophisticated. But it's a very simple notion -- if you have a small site, you don't need to buy software to make it easy for visitors to search your site,. just piggyback off AltaVista. Next slide
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