Converting Search into Navigation

I agree. The only mistake the user made with the search query: "pink impact resistant iphone 5 cover", is failing to realize that she probably only needed to search for "impact resistant iphone 5 cover". Products on this page may already have an option to choose pink. The fact that Amazon shows a lot of related products on a page is basically a form of category search, anyway.

I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon tweaked their search engine after the referenced study came out. Maybe even specifically for that word combination.

This happens a lot. When popular magazines do search tests with a range of apps and one of the result is "$foo didn't find our $absurd_word_that_we_use_for_testing" you can be sure that it will find it soon afterwards so they won't look bad again in later tests.

His point is that there is a gap between actual search functionality and people's understanding of it. Users expect to be able to type in something similar to how they would describe a product to a store clerk (e.g. "I need a pink, impact resistant iphone 5 cover."). But search fields don't understand language patterns or sentence meaning. Search fields work off key words, ranked by priority. These key words match item titles, descriptions, tags, categories, etc. It also isn't capable of doing word substitution, so it may not know you meant "case" instead of "cover". So if "cover" doesn't appear in the title or description, the search won't rank it that highly (if it's a "case").

In this case, putting the query as something like "iPhone 5 case pink" would have probably returned results that were more aligned with what the user was looking for, but most people aren't going to think that way.

When you understand how a search input actually works - text input, query statements, database structures, ranking algorithms, etc. - you think about searches in a completely different way. Most people don't understand these things, so they think about searches in terms of what they would ask an actual person for.

Pretty much my thoughts on this. In my experience of searching for things in several fortune 500 websites who can afford to implement good search engines, I end up searching their sites with google... Example search: whatever item site:microsoft.com ... which 7/10 times quickly finds exactly what I was looking for.

It's possible however that I tend to find what I want quickly than possibly some people because my google-fu is better than the average. A couple of my family members are in fact horrible at searching. They call me on the phone at least once every 2 weeks, because they can't find somehting on the Internet that I could find in my first search attempt. One probably because of low IQ and the other because of poor written English skills, neither of which can be easily fixed by merely 'learning to search better'.

Lastly, if all search engines functioned mostly the same both in terms of input method (keywords vs human questions) or syntax requirement (special commands or characters), then yes, learning to search better could have significant impact, but I find this is hardly the case.

I can't quite tell if you're implying this or not, but it's important to distinguish between "incompetent" as an insult and "incompetent" as a word meaning lacking in necessary skills.

In this case, identifying a users level of competence (or incompetence) is an important precursor for identifying the problem that technology needs to solve. And this appears to be exactly what Nielsen has done.

I'd take more offense to "pathetic" and "useless".