What is it?
You may not have heard of Faceted Navigation, but you have definitely experienced it.
Faceted Navigation is those search filters in many shopping websites where you can narrow down the search results by brand, colour, price, features, etc.
Spot the Difference
Apparently building a proper faceted navigation is no easy task. An authentic search system has to be feature complete and high performing. A knock-off product, on the other hand, is shy on both fronts.
First, the features. On the surface, faceted navigation searches by categories, or "dimensions". Brands and sizes are examples of dimensions. Many imitated products hardcode the selections in each dimension. This means that when a selection is applied to one category, the other categories do not reflect the changes.
A proper faceted browser, on the other hand, displays the navigation options based on the data. In addition, it shows the distribution of records in the form of a "refinement count".
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In fact, most knock-off faceted navigation products lack refinement counts.
In addition to refinement counts, a sophisticated faceted navigation engine often comes with features such as dimension hierarchy (sub dimensions visible only when specific parent dimensions are selected), multi-select (non-exclusive filtering) and so forth. Be sure to look for these features when evaluating a search system.
Aside from features, genuine and imitation products are also different in performance. Inga uses a specialized classification engine that scales to hundreds of thousands of records over dozens of dimensions, on a consumer grade server. One can expect even better performance with some hardware investment.
In comparison, products such as Magento use a generic storage structure. Websites that are powered by these engines come to a crawl very easily.
The Benefits
Faceted navigation can be an extremely effective tool for your audience to explore and discover information about you, in a manner that's highly relevant to their interest. This is only true if the navigation system is feature complete and performs fast.
