Search is for people who already know.

Adding search was easy. Deciding how much weight to give it took much longer.

A search field is a promise that the answer exists and you can name it. On a marketplace of changing offers, that promise is often false: the thing you typed may simply not be discounted tonight.

So search sits available but secondary, and an empty result is treated as a real state with a real answer — what is close to this, what is live now — rather than a dead end.

The most common query on a food marketplace is not a dish. It is a mood, and mood does not autocomplete.

The feed carries the weight instead. Search exists for the evening you have decided, which is rarer than any search box implies.

search empty results feed ranking product decisions discovery

Written by the Forsa team, Amman. Read next