Should search result urls be accessible and intuitive?

Question

We usually aim for friendly (vanity) urls to help visitors identify where they are in the website, e.g. www.website.com/products/acme-product. But, are there standards here for search results?

At the moment our search results are something like this:

http://www.website.com/search?by=<category>=<selected_category>&<price_range>=<selected_price_range>

The search query string seems intuitive to me, but I am looking for some standards here - or, if it's been identified that we don't need to worry about intuitive URLs for search results.

Answer 1

I recently did some research on that, and I came to the conclusion that the search urls needn't be accessible. It is surely nice to have them accessible like http://yourdomain.com/search?q=hello, but if you cannot manage that, it's no big issue.

How I came to these results:

• All major search sites have huge search URLS showing for a simple search: Just try a search for hello on Google and you will land on an url like this: https://www.google.ch/#hl=de&safe=off&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=hello&oq=hello&gs_l=hp.3..0l4.203.750.0.1012.5.5.0.0.0.0.594.2081.4-2j2.4.0...0.0...1c.wpHgEXrgAJU&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=474cec96d8423c1f&biw=1440&bih=758.

  Not really understandable to a normal user, right? There are other sites with search urls a little bit more accessible (like Youtube), but even then, it's never a memorable url the user would go and enter in the search bar. I think you can rely on these sites to do user testing quite thoroughly, so if it's not important for them, it may not be important for you.

• You can have a look at this research Nielsen did regarding users typing urls. From that you can deduce that for the normal user, it may be possible to remember an easy url. To remember how to search via the adress bar is asking too much.

• All the major browsers implement some sort of searching mechanism to the adress bar. This results in many users not even entering full URLs anymore, instead they just search for what they want (Awesome bar in Firefox, address bar in Google Chrome, usw)

There may be, however, other things which speak for considering an easy search url

• If you want to make your search url an access point of your API, for example, developers are surely happy to have easy accessible urls

• If you want to implement Open Search on your site so the user can use your site as a search engine in his/her browser, easily accessible urls reduce implementation time.

Answer 2

It is important to stick to the search standards so that:

1. Other utilities can search your sites. E.g. so that users can define (or add existing) search engine definitions to their browsers. (This is more of a SW API issue than a UX issue.)

2. Advanced users can quickly edit the query.

Answer 3

Why not continue the 'vanity' standard you established with your users else-ware in the site?

http://www.website.com/search/<selected_category>/<selected_price_range>

Use a url mapper to set the /<param>/ to be executed by convention. This should not a big technical challenge and services both the points brought up by: Danny Varod