Directories - Do you drill down or use the search facility?

Hi,

When using directories do you tend to click on on a category, subcategory etc "drilling down" untill you find what you want, or do you prefer to type what you want straight into a search box (if available)?

(I think that I probably do a bit of both)

Do you think its worth having a search facility? My concern would be people searching for something and not finding any matches (whereas if they drilled down they might find something - perhaps named a bit differently to what they would have searched for),

Thanks

 

I would use the search box facility....thats just easier

 

When are you going to stop asking stupid questions?
I’m sure you won’t ask car salesman if buying car with steering wheel is a good idea or if you should get one without steering
and yet you’re asking if main feature of not only directories but every site that uses search should be used at all.

Search box IS NOT some kind of luxury or even some form of courtesy but part of directory structure.
Sure if you have crazy time on your hands and have nothing better to do then you can browse categories but for me if directory
has no search box, that directory is simply dead.

As to intentionally making people waste their time just so they can find some piece of unrelated crap, I think you should learn
thing or two about how to build your directory index so you have at least a few answers to satisfy theirs search queries.



fastreplies

 

Hi fastreplies,

Thanks for your input - could you guess at the rough percentage of searchers vs drill-downs (e.g. 99%vs1%, 80%vs20%?).

Cheers

 

I have some directories that have robust searches on them. About 7% of users hit the search pages. However, about 80% of the traffic comes from search engines so those users enter the site on the page where the information they're looking for already exists. My guess is that the search would be more widely used if I didn't get so much search engine traffic.

 

Unfortunately most directories don't have enough site listings that make it worth using the Search features, but on the other hand a directory with thousands of site listing could produce results that benefit the users queries.

 

Thanks for the info - have made a note to do some A-B testing at some point