RoboHelp 2017 Delivers Improved Search

I can­not imag­ine life with­out search and I know I am not alone. A study by Pew Inter­net found that 92 per­cent of U.S. adults who are online use search engines to find infor­ma­tion on the Internet.

When I have a prob­lem with some­thing I own, such as Apple TV, I might look up the prob­lem in the print­ed doc­u­men­ta­tion (if I still have it!), go to the manufacturer’s web site, or just type the name and mod­el of the prod­uct in Google’s search field. From my expe­ri­ence, Google often pro­vides results that are as use­ful as the manufacturer’s sup­port web site.

In a world where users have embraced search, Robo­Help 2017 includes some wel­come improve­ments by dis­play­ing key­words as you type in the search field. For exam­ple, when I start typ­ing a search query about “con­tact­ing,” Robo­Help starts pro­vid­ing sug­ges­tions on the fly, sim­i­lar to Google’s search engine. This “pre­dic­tive search” is avail­able in the Respon­sive HTML5 out­put that is shipped with the lat­est ver­sion of RoboHelp.

Accord­ing to usabil­i­ty con­sul­tant Jakob Nielsen, users love search for two reasons:

• Search lets users “con­trol their own des­tiny” and assert inde­pen­dence from com­pa­nies’ attempts to direct vis­i­tors on web sites.
• Search is also users’ “escape hatch when they are stuck in nav­i­ga­tion.” When they can’t find a rea­son­able place to go next, they often turn to the site’s search function.

Giv­en that users love using search, it’s some­what sur­pris­ing that Nielsen found that they are often not very savvy when it comes to for­mu­lat­ing search queries.  He writes: “Typ­i­cal users are very poor at query refor­mu­la­tion: If they don’t get good results on the first try, lat­er search attempts rarely suc­ceed. In fact, they often give up.”

RoboHelp’s new search fea­ture may help mit­i­gate users’ weak­ness at writ­ing good search queries. Some oth­er ben­e­fits of RoboHelp’s search engine include:

• Search results change, depend­ing on the posi­tion of the cur­sor: Robo­Help may dis­play dif­fer­ent terms, depend­ing on the posi­tion of the cur­sor in the search field.
• Spell check fix­es incor­rect­ly spelled words: If users mis­spell words, the search engine rec­om­mends words that are most sim­i­lar to each word. Robo­Help accom­mo­dates for up to two mis­spelled words in each search query.
• Search algo­rithm includes users’ search his­to­ries: Robo­Help 2017 stores past search­es in cook­ies and dis­plays any match­ing search­es in the search results.

As cus­tomers increas­ing­ly focus on search to find rel­e­vant con­tent, Robo­Help’s new search engine is a wel­come addi­tion that should improve the user experience.