Importance of prioritising the search engine feature in your product

UX! UX! UX!

For starters, a great search engine improves the User Experience by a huge percentage, I could argue that the search engine is one of, if not the most important features for any content-related product, e.g a knowledge base such as Helpjuice Editor.

A great search engine saves users a whole lot of time as searching and quickly finding the answers they are looking for makes users happier, and the knowledge base becomes a reliable source of solutions.

Quick Access

Adding features like “did you mean” and allowing the article publishers and editors to “add tags” and maybe “buzzwords” that other users could search and lead to their articles aids in improving the overall efficiency of the product. These improvements allow for instant access to information that would not have otherwise been found unless the specific words searched were in the right article.

Scales Accordingly

Another crucial factor that benefits from a great search engine is its allowance for scalability. In a knowledge base, the amount of information and content keeps growing and becomes larger and larger as more content is added. Manually browsing through these articles is very tedious, frustrating and time-expensive to the users.

Adding a “did you mean feature” or ‘giving results for “sick leave” instead of “sick leabe”’ in cases where the user might have misspelled their entry gives allowance for getting results and answers regardless of the large amount of content. It makes it easy to surface relevant articles/information and can look past how much content is in the database without becoming too expensive for the user.

A smart efficient search engine is, in fact, a super power!