There are scores of services, solutions, and open source projects available today for adding search — from cloud providers and SaaS applications to built-in CMS search and search APIs — to your site, app, or e-commerce store. 

To try to make sense of it all, we’ve published a new Site Search Buyer’s Guide. In it, we share what features and functionality to look for in a site search solution, what features aren’t just nice-to-haves anymore, and discussed the tradeoffs between hosting options.

Search engines pre-date the web, so you might think search has been solved. Unfortunately, that’s far from the truth, which is why so many companies are looking for something better. Even search basics, such as handling misspelled words, can cause problems for search engines. More advanced capabilities such as natural language processing (NLP) are well beyond the scope of more site search solutions.

Up to 30% of your website visitors want to search your site. To help your customers find what they’re looking for, a site search solution should be able to do things like:

• Provide personalized search
• Tied to outcomes (such as conversions or sales) to deliver better results
• Display custom related results and special promotions
• Be A/B tested to improve search results or relevant product results
• Offer much richer user interfaces
• Have deeper search analytics to understand visitor intent

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Check out the new Site Search Buyer’s Guide — no signup required — and let us know what you think.