Choice.com.au search engine fails

Hi @BrendanMays, a fail of the search engine on Choice.com.au.

Search on ‘range hood’ or ‘range hoods’ and it returns a list of many products tested, but not the reviews or buying guide (at least not before one gets tired of scrolling).

Search ‘rangehood’ and the hits are what most of us would expect. It needs a touch of fuzzy logic or (choke, gag) some google search engine style smarts.

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Ditto with detergent: that only brings up laundry powders/liquids and dishwasher products. One has to use ‘dish washing liquid’ to find products for kitchen sink tasks… I wouldn’t have thought it would be too difficult to add all (practical) options for a search using ‘detergent’ as a keyword…
FYI I was brought up knowing that detergent was required for doing the dishes!

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Maybe the problems could be solved by changing the dropdown menu for Products with some of the regular/popular searches in the listing.

Note that Laundry detergent exists in the dropdown, but no kitchen or general cleaning/washing products.

Even this doesn’t appear in the Kitchen site page (viz. by clicking on the bold Kitchen link down shown on the dropdown above), but dishwasher detergent does. Seems a bit odd that one would but not the other…

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A few months back Bunnings had a similar problem where their search could not find the expected products for ‘shelves’ vs ‘shelving’ and each returned its unique subset. I called it to their attention and they fixed it, but I wonder how many other categories were affected to make it hard to find products.

I first realised ‘rangehoods’ not ‘range hoods’ when I got tired of scrolling and tried the pulldown.

which reinforces a search should find it all.

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Perhaps the webpage tags need to be increased to cover these common terms. I would think tags such as hood, range, range hood, rangehood, extractor, kitchen, kitchen hoods would increase the likelihood of a hit on search queries that are looking for rangehoods. Same goes for any review or item that you want to search for in the CHOICE search engine. As far as I know there is no limit to the tags that can be entered for a page and perhaps this may be a reasonable addressing of the problem?

Sure there will be terms that are across a number of items but then an offer to refine the search to more clearly target the wanted result should be easy to implement.

Perhaps the SEO of the pages is why it easier to get Google/Bing/Yahoo/Duck Duck hits for the results you sometimes want than using the CHOICE engine. I understand why SEO would be used as it increases the chances of a non CHOICE aware person finding CHOICE results but improving internal site searches as well is very important.

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Thanks for the feedback everyone, I’ll pass it on to our digital team :+1:

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The classic I have seen is searching for the topic “What do yoy feed your cat or dog?”

The article will not appear until the word “cat” has been typed after “What do you feed your”.

However, simply typing “cat” or dog" will cause the topic to display.

image

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Search results are entirely configurable by human beings.
The Choice web platform should provide a log of all search terms.
A human can then direct these search terms to an appropriate web page.
It’s not hard, just time-consuming.

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