5 Things Every Marketer Wished They Knew Before Building their Own Search Engine

Building your own search engine requires a tolerance for risk, since designing, building and tuning your search engine will likely result in temporarily unhappy customers who visit your website. To make the process as painless as possible, here are 5 things to know before deciding to build your own search engine.

1. Building and understanding core concepts will take time

The core idea of a search engine is to be able to take user input and transfer that into a product or service output which is most likely to fulfil their requirements. Although this sounds simple, it takes a lot of different components, including a sophisticated algorithm, huge amounts of data and a cloud-based architecture designed for your search system.

Since search engines use their own algorithms, you’ll need to implement a system which can do things such as rank by revenue, customer intent, previous customer behavior as well as product data and an understanding of synonyms. However, nowadays it’s possible to do this via machine learning, which is where an AI takes previous data and uses it to predict the most likely result a customer is looking for, based on hundreds of thousands of similar previous searches and the resulting customer behavior. This approach could save time, but it is highly technical and would require specialist help.

2. Building a search engine requires resources

Even basic search engines must be able to understand the semantic meaning behind the words and phrases entered into them, and this includes what other possible words and phrases could be used as synonyms. For example, an algorithm must be able to connect the words ‘sneakers’ and ‘trainers’ together to show the same results. It would not be good to have 200+ results show up on your UK-based website when you search ‘trainers’, but only 10 when a US customer searches for ‘sneakers’.

Similarly, these words must be connected to the products themselves, meaning if someone types in ‘blue running sneakers’ into your search bar, they’ll find trainers which are blue and designed for runners. All of this requires the engine to learn which results are right and which are wrong through trial and error, and this usually starts with the manual input of hundreds of synonyms, so the engine knows which products to display regardless of whether a user inputs ‘trainers’ or ‘sneakers’.

3. Merchandising features sold separately

Let’s say you’ve managed to build the bare bones of your search engine. Congratulations! But your work is far from over. One of the greatest advantages of online ecommerce offers is the potential ability to collect analytical data for marketing managers to oversee the optimization of sales. This requires a specialized process allowing for merchandising analytics to be collected and stored from customer behavior.

All of these features must be designed and built by yourself, extending the search engine project even longer than you may have been anticipating. However, the pay out from building a successful analytics-collection pipeline is huge. Merchandisers can use this data to see what’s working, how a storefront needs to change to promote best-selling products and how they can place products to sell the greatest number possible. Collecting individual analytical data also allows for the promotion of products to individuals based on their previous purchasing behavior – a tactic to personalize individual shopping experiences.

4. Infrastructure must be built professionally

The basic infrastructure behind a search engine must be built properly and robustly to account for changes in search traffic volume. Scaling up and down depending on demand is a key hallmark of a well-built system, and all this data must be collected and stored so merchandising teams can keep track of analytics.

Additionally, the input to the site must be facilitated by separately built tools. For example, changes in stock must be reflected on the website. If someone buys a product which has sold out, but your site says it’s still in stock, this can result in incredibly unhappy customers.

Your infrastructure must be able to handle the dynamic needs of the market – one from the customer end and one from your retail end. The task of building such an infrastructure shouldn’t be taken lightly, and can require weeks or even months of work from a dedicated team.

5. Personalization breeds success

In the modern technological era, more customers than ever expect a somewhat personalized experience when visiting an online website. 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience, and 74% feel frustrated when website content is not personalized.

This increase in personalization has led modern buyers to feel as if search engines should be able to act as advisors rather than just pipelines to results. For example, searches such as ‘___ shoes for ___’ have increased by over 120% in recent years, meaning that search engines are being required to take on more and more semantically demanding tasks. Making sure your search engine can do this is no mean feat and is slowly becoming a requirement for modern shoppers.