In this meeting, the State Changers explored how to use a fuzzy search in the tool Xano to improve user search experience on a website for nonprofits. A significant topic of discussion was the challenge of helping users find relevant information without knowing the correct terms to search. Solutions suggested focused on improving the text search capability with relations to words or phrases that could be relevant to the user’s search intention.
The State Changers proposed a few strategies: 1) Creating a button array based on user's needs. 2) Implementing fuzzy search from Xano to allow for non-exact keyword matches. 3) Adding synonyms to search queries to enhance the search results and be more inclusive of various search inputs. The discussion also touched on the concept of 'vectorization' in natural language processing to suggest that words and phrases close to each other in meaning should yield better search results. For example, the term 'advocacy' in the context of 'children rights advocacy' should also surface 'child protection advocacy' and other similar fields. An additional suggestion was to enhance information on nonprofit entities by requesting more targeted information during their registration process. By doing so, the increased data points from these nonprofits would allow for more precise search results for end-users. Finally, an interesting topic that arose was the challenge of incentivising non-profits to update their information to improve their discoverability. The State Changers concluded that creating a simple yet engaging platform would encourage more user interaction, thus leading to better data quality and more accurate search results.
(Source: Office Hours 11/17 AM )
