Search Results Pages Should Show the Most Relevant Result at the Top of the Page

Of all the principles in this guide, this might be the number one no-brainer. Of course, show the user the most relevant results first. Yet, time and again, this principle is broken and users are shown irrelevant items first in their results. So, why have you asked the user to search, then shown them a poor set of results?

Reason 1: Your search algorithm sucks.

Technically, this is the toughest one to solve. Ranking search results is, in some cases, a tricky technical problem, but there are tried and tested technologies (term frequency-inverse document frequency, or TF-IDF, is a very popular algorithm for ranking text documents, for example) and a lot of off-the-shelf search tools will include some sensible defaults.

It’s a difficult task to make your search perform as well as Google’s search does—but that’s what users expect. Users don’t understand...