Search related, natural language or keyword based

Question

I personally don't know how the end user will interact with my website. Therefore, it's more or less impossible for me to actually decide which search format I should use. I really don't know whether my users will be using natural search query's or just simple old keywords.

Could someone kindly suggest what would work more effectively for a digital e-commerces website? At the moment, I'm using both in conjunction, I don't know if that's a good or bad approach.

I should mention, it's been a couple of days since I've introduced the search feature.

My Webpage, A word of caution, I'm not the best web designer.

Answer 1

For your particular site, I'd go with plain old "keyword" search. I don't think anyone would search for something like a script that displays weatjer forecast on my user's screen. Instead, thye would probably look for something like weather forecast since they already know these are scripts, they will output to a screen for some particular user.

The above being said, if you can afford both... Go for it! It won't hurt your UX (other than some processing lags if your server is weak) and at worst you'll be able to compare and get patterns on how your users interact with your site, which you don't know atthis point. So either way, is a win win situation

Answer 2

Users will probably be looking for a general type of icon (i.e. weather), so a "keyword" approach will probably be the most natural way.

Try performing a search on this website. It seems to perform a very similar task using "tags" for each icon.