But very often a small aspect of search is neglected: The zero result page, or the zero results strategy (There are many reasons for this, I’ll explain one later*). Yesterday I came across a search that I think could benefit greatly from zero result strategy. I was reading an article about some really good Norwegian authors, and decided to buy some of the books at a Norwegian E-book store called ebok.no.  The E-book market in Norway is not very big, even if the general book market is. Few books are published as E-books and you often have to wait a while before a book is available as an E-book. I was lucky and found two out of the three books I wanted. The last one: “Bergeners” by Tomas Espedal I misspelled a couple of times before I got it right. Even then I had to check a regular bookstore to see if it was actually correctly spelled.

Solution: Monetize search

What if ebok.no, every time a user got a zero result, did a lookup in a database to check if the search query matched an actual book. If yes, say the following:

Sorry, we don’t have the book “[title]” by [author] available as an E-book.

Would you like us to send an email when/if it is available as an E-book at ebok.no?

It the user agrees, you have achieved one and maybe two things. Firstly, you’ve made your users do a one time subscription to pay you money even if you slapped them with a zero result. Secondly, if the user wasn’t a registered user already, you may have convinced him or her to become a registered user later on because of good customer service.

*One reason a zero result strategy often is neglected is that you need the search to be in production for a while before you have enough data to analyse your zero results. In most cases, by that time, the project has ended.