Search engines are one of the most important parts of any website for users. Making the search better and giving users more control to find what they are looking for faster makes our website easier to use.
This month, after much programming, testing, and feedback, we integrated a new search engine into the Nelson-Jameson website. This new search can help find what you are looking for better than ever. To give you some idea, our website is now using the same engine that powers the search on these sites (among many others): White House, Netflix, eHarmony, Ticketmaster, GameSpot, Zappos, digg, NASA Planetary Data System (PDS), and Instagram.
In addition to this powerful search engine, we’ve added two features so far (more coming) that will help you narrow down searches and really get to the products you are looking for.
The first feature is the "Results by Category" control. When you perform a search on our site, on the results page in the right-hand column you will see a list of subcategories with a number behind each name. If you click one of these subcategories, the search results will change to show you only those products from your results that are in that subcategory of our site. You can then choose to "Show All Results" to go back to all of your results, click another subcategory, or start a new search, etc.
The second feature is the "Search Within Results" search box. This field appears right above your search results and lets you narrow the list of products by searching within those results. So for instance, if you first search for "gaskets", about 530 products will be in the results. Then, if you type "o-ring" into the Search Within Results search box, your results will be narrowed to 30. You can then scroll through the products, sort them, or put more words into the Search Within Results search box to narrow your results even further.
These two control features on top of an enterprise-class search engine adds value to our website. Try it out yourself and see the speed, control, and ease of this new search engine that will help you find products better and faster.
