Ecommerce sites, media sites, and SaaS business sites rely on their on-site search engine to deliver relevant content to help customers pinpoint exactly what they need, fast. Selecting the right search solution can make a significant difference in your top-line revenue and customer satisfaction.

If you’re new to search, or considering a change in your search strategy, we’ve compiled 10 critical factors to consider when evaluating a search solution:

1. AI capabilities

Everyone knows that artificial intelligence (AI) is important, but what does that mean for search? Different AI algorithms play different roles in the delivery of search results:

• Better understanding: Natural language processing (NLP) structures a query for better processing by the search engine.
• Improved relevance: Vector-based search combined with keyword search provides vastly more relevant results that predict user intent while also significantly reducing no-search results.
• Automatic ranking: Learning to rank algorithms improves search results over time to automatically boost better search results based on your site’s metrics and audience.
• Smart personalization: AI-powered personalization delivers precisely tailored content, leveraging comprehensive insights from visitor behavior, preferences, feedback, and attributes.

At a minimum, today’s search solutions need to support these types of AI algorithms. You also might want to consider a solution that includes, or can be extended to support, AI chat, which will provide your customers with both search results as well as conversational chat. While ChatGPT won’t replace search anytime soon, it can enhance results and customer experience.

2. Control

AI can provide great results and automatically boost the best results to the top, but you may want to override results for a specific query or campaign. You should be able to customize and optimize the search result rankings temporarily to highlight annual sales or one-time promotions.
This includes the ability to:

• Pin results to the top or wherever they should appear in a search results page or product listing page
• Tweak the search algorithm to push certain results to the top based on attributes that you’ve defined, such as “popularity” or “sale”
• Use custom ranking rules

3. Transparency

Queries can sometimes produce puzzling results. A great example we’ve seen is a query for a “big TV” in an electronics search index.

Are those the results your customers would have expected from the query? Why does the search engine include TV stands in the results? The query itself is a bit ambiguous… what does “big” mean for a TV… over 40” something else?

The language that searchers use on your search engine may also be ambiguous, but your search engine should be able to tell you why something is ranking or not. As a website owner managing search for your site, you will want to understand what’s happening and how you can improve results like these. Without search result and search algorithm transparency, it’s hard to optimize results. A good search solution should help you understand how its keyword and AI algorithms work and give you a way to adjust them to your needs. This transparency helps build trust and allows you to fine-tune the system to avoid biases or poor weighting of results.

4. Integrations

It’s always obvious after the fact, but often missed when choosing a search solution: it has to seamlessly integrate with your existing systems and platforms like your website, CRM, or CMS. Check for available APIs, libraries, plugins, and pre-built connectors to make the integration smooth and efficient.

5. Ease of use

Search engines are complex systems that frequently require a technical user to configure. After configuration, however, other users may need access. Not all users are technically proficient, so it’s vital that the search solution is intuitive and easy to use for everyone. Look for a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop functionality and straightforward configuration options. The goal is to empower nontechnical users to manage and utilize the search solution without needing extensive training.

6. Global support

This includes three things:

• Internationalization and localization to work in other languages
• Support and/or community help for complex projects or settings
• SLA to assist in case anything goes wrong during business hours

In a globalized business environment, having a search solution that supports multiple languages and locales is crucial. Ensure that the solution can handle different languages, character sets, and regional settings. Additionally, ask about whether they offer support services in various time zones to provide assistance whenever needed.

7. Analytics

Any search solution you evaluate should support some kind of search analytics. How many of the searchers are finding what they’re looking for? What can be improved? If they’re getting frustrated, where? These are all important questions to track and remedy if needed.

Analytics are essential for understanding how users interact with the search solution so we can identify areas to improve. Google Analytics are useful, but your search solution would have so much more data available: look for features like search query reports, click-through rates, no-results reports, queries by geo, and other user behavior analytics. You may also want to be able to export analytics into your preferred reporting system so you can join it with other traffic data and analyze it all together.

8. UI Design kit

A comprehensive search design kit is a valuable resource for building and deploying search quickly. A good design kit should include a range of pre-built components, templates, and style guides that make it easier to create a consistent and visually appealing user experience. This allows developers and designers to quickly implement a cohesive look and feel that aligns with your brand. Some features to consider for any front-end design include:

• Responsiveness for mobile and tablet users
• Autocomplete (aka autosuggest)
• Results highlighting
• Consistency across web and mobile interfaces
• Filters, facets, and sorting menus
• Search bar and search results design

9. Speed and Scale

In the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery, the analysts point to scale as one of the things that sets the leaders apart.

With search, especially for certain use cases and sites, massive spikes in search volume can happen overnight (hello Prime Day buyers!). Performance is a critical factor in any search solution. The solution should be able to handle large volumes of data and deliver fast search results, even under heavy load.

As Amazon and Google have both shown, milliseconds matter for driving user experience and revenue. Be sure to evaluate the solution’s scalability to ensure it can grow with your business — especially under sudden spikes — and maintain high performance as your data and user base expand.

10. Automation

Let’s face it, you’re busy. And so is everyone else around you. Automation capabilities can greatly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your search solution while helping to remove the burden of day to day management. For example, Algolia’s AI Search learns what’s driving the best results for your business and automatically re-ranks results. Dynamic synonym suggestions generate new synonyms automatically so you can add them to your search index to drive better results.

When it comes to automation, look for features like automated indexing anytime your catalog (or site data) is updated, real-time feature updates (one area that SaaS solutions shine), and machine learning algorithms that continually improve search accuracy, relevance, and results.

Conclusion

Bonus suggestion: look at their customers, awards, and analyst mentions. One reason we want you to evaluate Algolia is our success with customers — more than 17,000 of them globally. We’ve made search easy to set up, configure, and scale so you can get back to your day job: making your customers happy.

We know there are a lot of solutions in the market, and there are a lot of factors to carefully consider. By using this checklist — AI capabilities, control, transparency, integrations, ease of use, global support, analytics, UI kit, speed and scale, and automation — you can find a solution that meets your business needs and delivers an exceptional search experience.

Don’t just take our word for it. In addition to our checklist, there’s also the new Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Search and Product Discovery which dives deep into the technologies, trends, and providers of search and discovery solutions. In it, you’ll find their analysis and criteria for understanding the market.

Take the time to evaluate your options and consider getting in touch with our team of experts to learn how Algolia might work for your business, or create a free account today to start building.