4 ms·

I think this very much depends on what kind of service your site provides, but in many cases I think we can argue that the Google fallback is good UX. It means

I think this very much depends on what kind of service your site provides, but in many cases I think we can argue that the Google fallback is good UX. It means the user doesn't need to figure out and navigate a new/different search system for each service. If the GP's right and people really do just drop out and use Google every time (even though the target site has a search function), then I think it's hard to argue that it's bad UX. Unless you want to argue that the specific sites' search functions are poorly made.

dgb23 5y ago
> Unless you want to argue that the specific sites' search functions are poorly made. You lose trust in the search function very quickly, if you gain it at all. Whether yours is effective and helpful does not only depend on the search implementation but also on whether your site actually has the information (that it should or is assumed to have) to be effective and helpful. A lot of factors come into this, representation, content, design both for search results and for the actual target pages. Now if you have the trust, are helpful and effective, then the UX is drastically improved. For one, search engine results have been degrading. There is _so_much_spam_ out there. Countless SEO sites that just crawl the web and generate crap output to show you ads, some seem to be handwritten as well. It is increasingly probable to get top results that are just presenting "stolen" content in some form or another. You get low effort blog-like posts that are just restating things they read in a discussion that is actually not the primary source, but a generated site, which is referring to the actual information somewhere else. Secondly if you have in-built, decent search people will use it and they will be happy for it, because you'll be presenting them much better suggestions in a better way and you'll do it faster. Think of some of the _best_ sites like MDN. Sure, you might enter the site via DDG or Google (in the former case you'll be searching directly like so: "!mdn [search_term]"). But when you're on the site you'll be happily navigating it via links and search, because it's just a very good site. Other examples of this are: wikipedia, tailwind, clojuredocs, reactjs, hn.algolia... They all have rich content, good search, useful links. It's a very effective combination.

dgb23 5y ago

> Unless you want to argue that the specific sites' search functions are poorly made. You lose trust in the search function very quickly, if you gain it at all. Whether yours is effective and helpful does not only depend on the search implementation but also on whether your site actually has the information (that it should or is assumed to have) to be effective and helpful. A lot of factors come into this, representation, content, design both for search results and for the actual target pages. Now if you have the trust, are helpful and effective, then the UX is drastically improved. For one, search engine results have been degrading. There is _so_much_spam_ out there. Countless SEO sites that just crawl the web and generate crap output to show you ads, some seem to be handwritten as well. It is increasingly probable to get top results that are just presenting "stolen" content in some form or another. You get low effort blog-like posts that are just restating things they read in a discussion that is actually not the primary source, but a generated site, which is referring to the actual information somewhere else. Secondly if you have in-built, decent search people will use it and they will be happy for it, because you'll be presenting them much better suggestions in a better way and you'll do it faster. Think of some of the _best_ sites like MDN. Sure, you might enter the site via DDG or Google (in the former case you'll be searching directly like so: "!mdn [search_term]"). But when you're on the site you'll be happily navigating it via links and search, because it's just a very good site. Other examples of this are: wikipedia, tailwind, clojuredocs, reactjs, hn.algolia... They all have rich content, good search, useful links. It's a very effective combination.