Humla and Icelandic search

Icelandic is hard on search boxes. One product can be typed many ways: jakki, jakka, jökkum, jakkar. A plain keyword search treats each of those as a different word, so a customer who types a perfectly normal phrase can end up with nothing.

The two web shops I work on, kemi.is and poulsen.is, now use Humla for product search. Humla is an Icelandic search engine for web shops, made by Verzla, and it is built around the language: inflections, compound words, synonyms and common misspellings.

What changes for someone searching the shops:

• The word form stops mattering. A word in the dative plural finds the same products as its dictionary form.
• Results appear while you type, in a dropdown under the search box.
• Words and meaning are weighed together. Describing what you need can find a product that is named differently.
• No more dead ends. When nothing matches exactly, the search suggests the closest products instead of an empty page.
• The results page can be filtered and sorted by price, newest and most popular.

On the shop side it is a WooCommerce plugin that takes over the existing search form. The catalogue stays where it is.

The part I like most runs the other way. Every search is a customer telling us what they want, in their own words. The search statistics now show on our intranet, so the whole team can see what people are looking for.