Introducing the Surprising DrupalSearch.org | SearchStax Blog

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May 03, 2022

Tom Humbarger

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2 min. read

At DrupalCon 2022, Sameer Maggon, head of product for SearchStax, gave a presentation titled “Introducing the Surprising DrupalSearch.org”. It was surprising because of the quality of the search results on the current drupal.org website, and surprising because of the modest effort required to build a better search experience based on real drupal.org content.

Importance of Search

Sameer started off the presentation looking at the importance of search and gave these statistics to prove his point:

Search abandonment costs in excess of $300 billion annually in the US
84% of companies fail to optimize and measure their on-site search
When a customer uses search, they are 1.8 times more likely to convert
75% of users search queries are influenced by Google auto-suggestions and these uses make a selection from the suggestions rather than typing the rest of their search term

How Do We Make Search Better

Google has raised expectations in providing results that users are looking for from a keyword experience and upped the ante in what to expect out of a great search experience. Unfortunately, when you look at many corporate websites today, that experience is not on par with the Google experience.

Looking at the search experience on the drupal.org website, there are many areas of improvement. Sameer issued some search examples, showed the results and pointed out several areas of deficiency in the current search results.

This led into a discussion of the 3 key ingredients for better search:

Analytics and metrics to help owners understand what users are searching for and clicking on
Capability set for facets, geospatial, ranking, relevance spell check, related searches, etc.
Deliver maximum value for relevance and ranking to get users to where they want to go as quickly as possibilities

Sameer then revealed what a great search experience could look like on Drupal based on a project called DrupalSearch. DrupalSearch was built as a demonstration for DrupalCon using real drupal.org content.

Next Steps for DrupalSearch.org

After showing some potential results on DrupalSearch.org, Sameer ended with a list of next steps for getting a better search experience on drupal.org. SearchStax has already volunteered to support the project efforts from a hosting, time and license perspective.

Get sponsorship to support the project efforts (hosting, time and
license) from SearchStax – DONE
Get Support from Drupal.org Website team to crawl the website or get
access to data
Get permission to use “drupalsearch.org” and make it available to
Drupal Community (verify the trademark usage)
Make search analytics and insights publicly available to Drupal community

Watch the Surprising DrupalSearch.org Presentation

Watch the entire presentation below or on Drupal Association YouTube channel or download the slides.

By Tom Humbarger

Senior Marketing Programs Manager

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