Facet search – made popular by sites like Amazon.com and eBay.com – is a tried and tested method of easily getting users directly to the content they need by giving them a sidebar full of separate “facets” to narrow their search by. This strategy delivers strong results for eCommerce sites, but it can be used for organizing any type of content.
With the addition of a premium plug-in, some configuration and bit of back-end coding, you can have faceted search features on your WordPress website.
Why is this a good thing?
Faceted search has become a popular technique in commercial search applications, particularly for online retailers and libraries. An increasing number of enterprise search vendors provide software for implementing faceted search applications.
Online retail catalogs pioneered the earliest applications of faceted search, reflecting both the faceted nature of product data (most products have a type, brand, price, etc.) and the ready availability of the data in retailers’ existing information-systems. In the early 2000’s retailers started using faceted search, leading to its ubiquity as of 2012 in their online storefronts. Examples include the filtering options that appear in the left column on amazon.com or Google Shopping after a keyword search has been performed.
If you would like more information about adding faceted search to your WordPress website, please contact, steve@e2mktg.com