There is a concept in sales call benefits based selling, this is where you sell your product or service based on the benefit it will give your customer not on the features of the product being sold. For example if I was selling you home cleaning services I would talk about the fact you could get 2 hours back a week to go to the cinema not on services I could provide such as dusting or cleaning the oven.

This same approach can be used in a search context either using a simple keyword interface or with content filters / navigators or wizards.

The key advantage of using a benefits based searching technique is that you can reduce or if your lucky remove the complexity of the search scenario. As the searcher you no longer need to be an expert in the topic you are searching, you only need to consider the reason behind your search.

For example lets look at the scenario of a consumer searching for a new camera, you could allow them to search on size of memory card, number of megapixels, size of battery or even length of lens. All of these attributes would require me to be knowledgeable about photography. How about you switch this around and allow the consumer to think about how they will use the camera. Do they want to take pictures for 3 months without downloading them, do they want to print pictures off the camera and create large posters, or do they want to take pictures of distant objects. All of these questions can be used to identify the attributes that are important to the consumer, more importantly these are all questions that can be answered without having a deep knowledge of the topic being searched. This is the advantage of benefits based searching.

Retail is a great example of how benefits based searching can deliver you consumer advantage, I think local search is the next sector in which this paradigm will take off. When you consider the disparte topics that local search sites cover, you can’t expect consumers to be experts in all of the these fields. Educating consumers with content is one mechanism to improve the search experience, benefits based searching is another. Just make sure you have the ability to link the benefits users are searching on to the attributes you have stored in your database.