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Suppose the user is presented with a search functionality and searches for Jose. For the moment, the search query is returning all the Jose but it also returns Joseph becasue Jose is included in the word Joseph.
What's the best practice in terms of UX for search results in that case? Should searching for Jose only return Jose or also include Joseph?
results should also include Jose, joseph, sanjose**. many times we dont remember full name or correct name, search should be able to provide all options. you can always have filters to narrow your results.
Remember the first page of results is critical, so your rules must weight closer matches to the actual term(s) more highly than looser matches. This rule applies more when larger result sets are found or expected, but be wary of returning too many results for a search.
I would use the following rules:
if a search term directly matches a product id (or other DB id) i would list this single result first
then search for the entire phrase, or results that contain all the terms provided
then I would search for the fragmented set of terms and display those results next, including part of a word that matched a term
I think "Jose" should NOT return all names that begin with the string "jose." I could see providing a means of creating a wildcard (e.g. *, !, etc), but automatically doing it will create a situation where users will get a list of results that will be filled with warrantless results. To use a more extreme example, imagine a user who is searching for Jane Li and decides to search on last name. Her list would get results for: Li, Ling, Lister, Littel, Little, Lin, Lise...
