In a digital world, media libraries are some of our favorite places to be. Whatever you’re looking for — trending news podcasts, old songs, the latest movie releases, eLearning courses — endless troves of it are mere clicks away.
But media libraries can be exhausting places. Everyone’s had the experience of not easily finding the media they’re after:
- Getting “No results” after you typed a long query
- Waiting too long for your content page to load
- Not finding the next episode in the series you’re bingeing
- Seeing content for teens when you’re searching for kids
And the list goes on. People remember those less-than-excellent media search and discovery experiences. They act on them, too, by leaving a site for a competitor’s, canceling their subscription, and not recommending a service to friends and family.
Those actions are detrimental to media providers. Bad search is expensive in terms of lost clicks, data, subscribers, and conversions. Instead of leveraging user engagements to get more streams, interest, and purchases, organizations are prevented from seeing the business results they want.
If bad search is detrimental, the way you surface content is fundamental
How is your site search performing? Is your media technology stack as robust as it needs to be in today’s content-rich landscape?
Use this eBook to make sure you’re delivering the seamless, rewarding content experience that users expect. Use it to:
- Identify what’s stopping you from building a powerful and memorable media site experience
- Discover what’s possible when you integrate an AI-powered search tool into your media tech stack
- Use voice, personalization, and other advanced features to see significant growth in KPIs such as time spent on site, click engagement, and subscription sign-ups
What’s tough about search in media
The media technology stack is more than a content library. Companies need quality tools to help surface relevant content. It’s not always easy.
Low textual relevance
The way into the search toolbar is through text and typing. Seems simple, but it’s hard to do well without advanced natural language processing capability.
People use a lot of different words to say the same thing. Your “romantic comedy” is someone else’s “date night movie,” “romcom” or “chick flick,” even though you all want to scroll the same list. People type fast on a variety of keyboard types and use different languages. Letters are skipped, typos are commonplace, and multilingual keyboards make weird things happen.
On a less-than-stellar media tech stack, these inputs read as glitches. Instead of interpreting user intent correctly, your user is given a list of irrelevant content or zero results — both hallmarks of a poor search experience.
To keep up with today’s competition, you need machine learning and large language models to break down user requests and understand what they want.
Insufficient personal and business relevance
Even if rigid keyword search works well enough to deliver content your users are looking for, that can be a dead-end street. Your deep catalog holds more treasures than your user knows about. It’s in your best business interest to encourage them to explore more and deeper.
To do that, you need to know what moves them. That requires some way to gather event data: the clicks, views, searches and purchases that your audience members have made in the past and are likely to make again.
Your team also needs the flexibility to promote seasonal and time-sensitive content that intersects with users’ personal preferences and behaviors. Someone’s generic search for a romcom movie could intersect with holiday content, a summer new release or support partnership content and products that deliver ROI.
Identify what’s stopping you from building a powerful and memorable media site experience.
Lack of infrastructure for fast, federated, omnichannel search
Music and video streaming services increasingly offer up games, reading material, and ecommerce alongside their core offerings. Beyond that variety, today’s users are accessing that content from every kind of device.
Multimedia giants like Twitch, Roblox, and Amazon Prime use federated search to give users wide-ranging results, whatever the format. To keep users engaged and subscribing, today’s media providers need equally robust infrastructure to work across all media types and deliver relevant results instantly from all your content libraries.
Building personalization features and business signal capabilities into your media stack on your own can be challenging. If you don’t have dedicated developers, your content teams might fall behind waiting on back-end stack adjustments to deliver front-end excellence.
Voice propels media content discovery
Voice-enabled search is already the future of media content discovery. Home assistants like Alexa or Siri are many people’s go-tos for searching sites and apps for music, podcasts, and other media content. When people talk to their smart TVs, it’s usually to find and stream sports, movies, videos, and games.
When voice search is implemented, media discovery is instantly more powerful. A combination of AI-powered natural language understanding (NLU), filters, and full-text search helps return the right results to spoken search queries, enriching the experience for your users.
With voice, people no longer try to guess what a media website wants them to enter. They don’t need to think about spelling or typos or clicking letter by letter on a remote. They don’t even need to remember the exact title of the media they’re searching for. They can search and browse for songs, podcasts, or audiobooks hands-free, while they’re driving or working. Just speak and let NLU do the rest.
Search steps without voice:
- Unlock phone
- Find app
- Type keyword
- Find results
- Narrow result
- Select result
- Consume content
Search steps with voice:
- Ask
- Receive
Finally, a typing workaround
It might sound strange to say we’re “returning” to voice, but with digital devices, that’s the case. Leaving keyword search behind has been a long time coming.
Voice is a valuable commodity for media providers to tap into. When users express themselves naturally, those word choices reveal more about what makes users tick. It reveals more about how people use and talk about your content. Best of all, when voice queries are cross-referenced with existing user preferences and behaviors, search relevance improves.
A voice query like “Play the latest hockey news podcast” could potentially turn up a huge list of options. If this user always chooses podcasts under 15 minutes long, that data point drastically narrows the search. It gets the user to desired content faster and easier.
From the user standpoint, voice delivers instantaneity. Bypassing the toolbar and the keypad feels faster and easier. Finding and exploring content through voice feels more direct.
Behind the scenes, NLU offers search-as-you-type capability without the typing. It strips down natural language to essentials:
- Parsing sentences to identify the parts of a query that are most important
- Understanding synonyms and keyword variations
- Distinguishing and understanding singular and plural forms
- Removing stop words like “what” and “the” that don’t add value to queries
With a grasp of user intent and user event data, you can surface relevant media results that feel more instant and useful.
Personalization makes the media experience unforgettable
Media content is a personal choice. One size does not fit all. At the same time, users expect media sites to anticipate what they’re looking for and understand their queries, spoken or typed. When media providers get it wrong, it’s a huge disappointment. If users are forced to re-do their search to make up for a clunky experience, they’re likely to bounce to a competitor site.
Relevant results keep users engaged. For maximum relevance, personalization must be a core part of the media technology stack.
Personalization in three steps
Building a personalization engine from scratch is possible, but demands engineering resources, time and expertise. Algolia’s API-based search and discovery platform offers a quicker solution in three steps:
- Track and send user events to Algolia: Events are activities users have performed, such as previous content clicked, viewed, purchased, or other search terms entered, and other helpful details. Algolia makes it easy to track user events depending on user consent preferences and your business priorities.
- Configure your personalization strategy: Decide what those user events mean and optimize your search ranking strategy for each user with propensity scores. With Algolia, your content teams have full control over the ranking formula and attributes, letting Algolia handle the calculations.
- Enable search personalization: “Turn on” personalization for voice or text searches on your website and provide automatically customized results to site visitors.
Blending control and flexibility
Advanced search personalization puts your media platform in charge of how search results are surfaced to users. Leveraging your subscribers’ preferences against your catalog and business objectives improves search accuracy and builds relevance.
Adding personalization capability to your media tech stack makes the content experience seamless, dynamic, engaging, and profitable:
Boost engagement by eliminating “null” or “zero” results
If a search query doesn’t deliver exact matches in your catalog, leverage user events to surface “similar” or “trending” categories and content and “results that friends liked.”
Help users discover new content
Use banners, shelves, facets, and federated search to boost media content that aligns with user interests. Someone who’s clicked on NASA documentaries in the past may look at science-fiction-themed content or choose to watch other documentaries.
Leverage personalization to grow your KPIs
If your business goal is to surface content from an educational or product partner, boost that content to interested users.
Algolia automates the personalization process and integrates it efficiently into the search and discovery process, making it seamless for content teams to set up and run. As an all-in-one search service, it unlocks AI-powered relevance and recommendation features, without a heavy engineering lift.
How AI search delivers a brilliant browse experience
With media content, search is far more than information retrieval. A next-level browse experience is essential to enrich the experience. Algolia builds this experience through:
- Consistency between browse and search
- Advanced language understanding features, including typo tolerance and synonyms
- Query expansion feature: Display a range of personalized browsable content alongside content promoted for business reasons
- Federated search across all media types
Page setup, personalization, and promotion
When search is done right, it helps your users discover new and interesting content and meet specific business goals.
A first glance at a page is already a form of search. The right setup for your landing page needs to offer retrieval and exploration to get people inspired and exploring. Offer visual components to get people inspired and exploring, such as hero images, banners, and boosted content.
There needs to be consistency between the browse and the search page. Search results should perfectly match category results, even if a user misspeaks or mistypes the query or uses different words or synonyms to find it.
The page needs to provide frequent personalized and promoted recommendations. Algolia’s Query Expansion Feature solves this task by providing a set of categories that relate to the user query.
- Searching “romantic comedies” reveals a series of new options, such as zombie romcoms, sci-fi romcoms or holiday romcoms
- Promoted content such as romantic comedies “in theatres now” or “just released”
- Expand the query to additional categories, such as actors or directors
Algolia’s federated search capability can inject additional content into your page where desired, such as articles, blogs, images or AI generated content to support the current search.
Algolia lets media providers set up search quickly and easily.
Algolia’s advanced personalization generates a user profile. Its UI components make it easy to dynamically add shelves to the landing page that best match user preferences, displaying titles, genres or actors the user explored recently and is likely to revisit. To encourage users to remain on the site and discover similar and related content, implement Algolia’s recommendation feature.
Algolia AI search provides endless possibilities to keep audiences interested in your media content and engaged on your website.
Revolutionize your media tech stack with the world’s leading content search solution
Even with entire media worlds at our fingertips, it’s not easy to find what we need. We rely on our content browsers for guidance, but that experience needs to be rewarding and seamless. A modern search experience is a cornerstone of how media is delivered and consumed. The media technology stack needs to give customers what they’re looking for. The best way is by using proven AI search solutions.
An all-in-one for media search
Algolia overcomes media search and discovery challenges by understanding user intent, maximizing search relevance and delivering personalized results. It’s a one-stop-shop for AI search that easily integrates with your tech stack, offering:
- Understanding: Powerful voice and text analysis tools understand user intent automatically
- Personalization: Easy-to-implement control over rankings from dashboards, plus third-party integrations to round out customer profile
- Ready-made API infrastructure: Lightning-fast search and an extensive library of UI components to customize your interface
Algolia lets media providers set up search quickly and easily, leveraging voice searches and personalization features sooner to keep audiences interested, entertained, and engaged.
About Algolia
Algolia is a leading provider of AI search solutions, serving over 18,000 businesses and 500,000 developers globally. Renowned for its user-friendly API-First platform and the fastest AI search technology, Algolia is the largest hosted search engine, trusted by businesses and developers for 1.75 trillion searches per year. Backed by a decade of innovation, expertise, and growth, Algolia continuously redefines the search landscape with its commitment to user-friendly solutions, significant scalability, and unmatched speed. Learn more: www.algolia.com
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