✦ Task type · Website testing
Site search fails on the words nobody on your team would type
Your search box is tested with the correct product names by people who know them. Customers arrive with a misspelling, a synonym, and a plural.
Site search is where a customer goes when navigation has already failed them. Failing twice in a row is what makes it expensive, and internal testing almost never reproduces it because internal testers know the words.
What to put in the public brief
- That it is a set of search tasks on a website
- Desktop or mobile
- That screenshots are required
- Roughly how long
- Whether familiarity with the category disqualifies them
Keep the URL and any query list private.
What to put in the private instructions
Give goals, never queries
"Find something to keep a laptop cool" rather than "search for laptop stand". The words they pick are the finding.
Ask them to record the exact query typed
Character for character, including anything they abandoned halfway.
Ask what they did after a bad result
Refine, go to the menu, use a search engine instead, or leave. The recovery path tells you what failure actually costs.
Run typos as a second pass
Ask them to repeat one successful search with a plausible misspelling and report what happens. Zero results for a doubled letter is a common and quietly costly defect.
Proof worth requiring
Ask for
The exact queries typed, screenshots of the results, whether they found it, and what they did next when they did not.
Do not ask for
A judgement on result relevance ranking. Ordinary users cannot assess ranking quality in the abstract, and the useful signal is behavioural: what they clicked, or that they did not.
When this task type is the wrong tool
If people never use search, find out why before improving it — a findability test tells you whether the menu is doing its job.
If search works and the product genuinely is not there, that is a catalogue problem wearing a search problem's clothes.
Common questions
Why not just read my search logs?
Read them first, and they will tell you what people typed and whether they clicked anything. What they cannot tell you is what the person was actually looking for when they typed it, which is the difference between a query that failed and a query you do not stock.
What should I have them search for?
Give a goal and let them choose the words. That is the whole instrument. The moment you supply the query you are testing your own vocabulary, and your vocabulary is the one thing already known to work.
What reward is fair?
Six to fourteen dollars for a set of searches with screenshots. Short work, but ask for reasoning on the failures and pay for the paragraph.
What about typos and plurals?
Test them deliberately as a second campaign. Most search implementations handle exact matches and fall over on a doubled letter, and nobody notices because nobody on the team types badly enough.
Thinking of taking this task?
The same job, from the other side. Rewards are set by the poster, so treat these as the range this task type usually sits in rather than a promise.
- Usually pays
- $6 to $14
- You need
- Any device with a browser
- Proof expected
- Your exact queries, screenshots of results, and what you did next
Use your own words rather than the poster's. The words you choose are the finding, so do not try to guess the right search term.
Create a worker accountTest your search
Set the reward and how many testers you need. Workers reserve a spot; the site and the query list stay private until they do.
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