SortFix Powered Search Blog

Many have asked us about our ‘Power Words’ and I realized that though most people understand very well that because “Power Words” are related to the search, some should be added to the search query, only few grasp the idea that the “Power Words” can also be used as a negative filter.

For this reason I decided to elaborate a little further on the power of the “Power Words”
We believe that the user is the only one who knows exactly what he is looking for. Nevertheless, users usually have a hard time describing what they are looking for, mainly because sometimes they are unfamiliar with particular search field. Moreover, it is cognitively a complex task to describe a specific subject in just a few words that don’t lead to adjacent or even far related subjects.

Why is this such a complex cognitive task?

For example, how many different meanings come to your mind when I say the word “box”?

It is not as simple as we might think; each synonym has a slightly different meaning and therefore can lead us to results that are different than those we are looking for.

If I search for a Box the results may relate to the sport ‘boxing’, to ‘box office’, to movies, ‘music box’ and so on. No one can predict in advance all the words should be excluded from the query.

Excluding and including words is crucial for a successful and effective search – unrelated articles may cluster the results making it much harder to find the relevant ones. Unfortunately the searchers can’t predict all the results that might or not be related to their search query. This is the reason why SortFix analyzes the search results according to the user’s search query and generates the ‘Power Words’.

In my next posts I would like to elaborate on the importance of our ‘Add to Search’ and ‘Remove from Search’ features that come into use with the ‘Power Words’.

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