LG.com Internal Search Gone Wrong

Published: December 9, 2008

Updated: August 9th, 2020

lg internal search

When you are one of the biggest electronics manufacturers you need to make sure your website usability is great.

What if someone wants to buy one of your products, comes to your website, searches for the product name, and doesn’t find the product page? How would that look like to your prospect? Like LG:

Searching for the model 42LGX returns “Sorry, no matches were found”.

42lgx-lcd-hdtv-search-result-page
42LGX – Search Result Page

So, are you manufacturing this product or not? The page exists on the LG website, as you can see here:

42lgx lcd hdtv page
42LGX – Product Page

What can I say?! This is bad. Really bad for a manufacturer like LG. And this is not the only issue with the website. It was really difficult to find this product even using navigational or structural links.

Here’s what you need to do: export a list of your products and start querying your database for those names. Create a simple .txt (.csv or .xml) containing the search term and for each query add a code: -1, if there are no results; 0 – if one result was found; 1 if multiple results are found; Save the file and open it with excel to sort by code column. You’ll get a list of queries without results. Go and fix them.

This is a very simple and effective way to correct possible mistakes with your internal search engine. Of course, handling misspellings, product name variations, or model numbers, is a different story. But, start fixing the basics, then go to advanced techniques.

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