Three Pillars of Search Quality — Part 1: Findability
Source: https://blog.searchhub.io/three-pillars-of-search-quality-in-ecommerce-part-1-findability Author: Andreas Wagner (searchhub.io)
Summary
First part of the Three Pillars framework for e-commerce search quality. Findability is the foundational pillar: can users find what they’re looking for at all?
Findability Defined
A user can “find” a product when:
- The product exists in the catalog
- The query matches it (via keywords, Synonyms, or semantic matching)
- The result appears within the first few pages
Findability fails when any of these break — most commonly due to vocabulary gaps between how users describe products and how they’re indexed.
Key Findability Metrics
- Zero Results rate: % of queries returning no results — direct findability failure
- No-click rate: results shown but nothing clicked — indirect findability failure
- Query reformulation rate: user changes query after seeing results — signals findability failure
Findability Improvements
- Synonyms expansion — bridge vocabulary gaps
- Spelling correction — catch typos before retrieval fails — see Spelling Correction
- Query relaxation — fall back to partial matches before returning zero results
- Dense Vector Retrieval — semantic matching covers vocabulary gaps implicitly
Part 2 Preview
Part 2 covers Discovery & Inspiration — serving users who don’t have a specific product in mind.