Contextual Continuity: The Key to a Seamless Search Experience

Improve your retention by collecting and transferring the context of a user's search to the resulting page for a seamless experience.

Contextual Continuity: The Key to a Seamless Search Experience

Have you ever searched for a phrase then clicked a result, only to struggle finding that same phrase on the resulting page?

Google, being the inspiration of all search experiences, handles this quite well. When I search: "which species were the first to be domesticated?", among the first results is an interesting URL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#:~:text=Dogs%20were%20the%20first%20species%20to%20be%20domesticated

Let's parse what's happening here after the page title, "Dog":

  • :~:text= - Indicator to highlight the subsequent encoded text. More on this on Google's official page.
  • Dogs%20were%20the... - URL encoded text to tell the page what to highlight.

The resulting page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#:~:text=Dogs%20were%20the%20first%20species%20to%20be%20domesticated

This is great because the context from when I searched my question is transferred seamlessly to the actual resulting page. But why don't other search engines do this?

We Makes it Easy

Mixpeek provides end-to-end utilities that are able to collect the context of a user's search and relay that context to the clicked page. This provides a stellar search experience in which users aren't forced to context shift between the search page and resulting page.

Index

Wherever your content lives, we have you covered. You can use the admin panel's drag and drop content indexer:

Or automate the indexing by connecting your file store directly via code:

from mixpeek import Mixpeek

mix = Mixpeek(
    api_key="mixpeek_api_key",
    access_key="aws_access_key",
    secret_key="aws_secret_key",
    region="region"
)

mix.index_bucket("mixpeek-public-demo")
Index Directory Documentation

Embed

Next, you'll embed Mixpeek's Javascript widget:

<script type="text/javascript">
(function(){    
    let public_key = '1234567890';
    let script = document.createElement('script');
    script.setAttribute('id', 'embedded_search');
    script.src = `https://cdn.mixpeek.com/script.js?public_key=${public_key}`;
    document.head.appendChild(script);
}());             
</script>

This script both securely and privately collects user's search activity but also embeds the search bar on your page. Read more about our security stance.

Here's an example of what a search bar would look like:

This is an autocomplete search bar which highlights the terms that were responsible for each result's importance.

Let's say a user clicks the second result, they're then navigated to a page where the URL, similar to Google's is like:

https://your.website/Tutorials#:~:text=sed%20do%20eiusmod%20tempor%20incididunt%20ut%20labore%20et%20dolore%20magna%20aliqua%20automate

Notice at the very end, how the #:~:text= content contains the description from the second result:

Continuity

Once the user clicks into the page titled "Automate The Stuff Where it Works", they are dropped onto a pre-highlighted portion of text so they know exactly where the terms from the search exist. Within their original context:

Measure

After implementing the Contextual Continuity embedded search functionality, you can use the analytics dashboard to test how effective it as at moving your business' KPI.
For example, when we observe an uptick in conversion percentage after the date it was added, there's a strong confidence that it's because of the Contextual Continuity.

If you'd like to learn more about how Mixpeek can keep your existing users engaged and build new evangelists, reach out. We'd love to chat.