The search page is of great importance to any site, especially larger ones where navigation becomes complicated and cumbersome. Here’s what it should contain:
Search field
This is the most obvious element of the search page, as it would not exist without it. The search field should be placed at the top of the page and styled in such a way that it is consistent with both the rest of the site and the current page. If you have smaller search fields on individual pages, they should have the same or very similar design.
Although people usually know that pressing the Enter button will start the search, it’s a good idea to also include a visual button to start the process.
The search field usually contains text that tells the user what or how to search. You could also leave all the freedom in the hands of the user and simply describe what the field is for.
“Search”, “What are you looking for?” or “How can we help?” are texts that are sufficiently indicative so that the user can understand what the field is for and have complete freedom to search for what they need without being guided.
Results visualization (Results page)
Often, but not always, the results page is absolutely identical to the search page. This is, of course, impossible when the search engine is located on a page that is not intended for search, but has a search engine – blog, help, home page, etc.
On the results page, you should:
- First, show results that are relevant to the search, not ones that you like (or want to highly recommend).
- Give as much information as possible to contextualize the result – title, content category, description, thumbnail (accompanying, main image), if available.
- Show the number of results – recommended, but not required.
- If there are too many results, it is by no means appropriate to pour them onto one endless page. Divide the results into 10-15 per page.
- If there are no results, direct the user to search for another term.
Search Progress
Search results may not be available instantly, so the user needs to be shown that there is some process in motion, so that they don’t think the site is frozen and have to start the process over. As you can imagine, this would lead to a high level of frustration.
Tips
Provide users with hints about what to search for, such as what are the most searched words, what were recently searched (by them or by everyone). You could also add automatic spelling correction in case the user starts typing incorrectly.
Categories and Filters
Again, depending on the size of the site, adding filters to the search (or to the results later on) could be both a form of Sisyphean labor and a great idea.
If you have a large site with thousands of pages, visits and searches every day, adding filters will make things much easier for users.
Sorting
Again, only if it is worth the effort, you could give users the option to sort content by certain criteria – price, newness, relevance.
Keyword highlighting
This is a practice you have probably noticed on Google. When a search is performed, in the (meta) description below the title and link, the words that match the user’s search are bold. This draws their attention to these words and they can more easily filter the results to find the one(s) that will meet their need.
