Stemming isn't always good
I was using one of the local job sites the other day.
I entered Usability into the search box as one of the keywords. To my surprise the results were returning matches to the word “use”. I wasn’t interest in any those matches, just in the word “usability”. I tried putting the word within quotes, but that made no difference to the results. That’s so wrong!
Hmmm… I know stemming is a powerful part of search technology, but you need to rank the results properly. I think it would have been better a list of alternative matches – like Google’s “Did you mean….” technology.
On a related note, here is a really good report from 37 signals on the search capability of several US ecommerce sites. It provides some great insight on what is important when building search technology. Enjoy.