New Architect shows (with examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly), why contingency design is important, and what you should do – including some nice tips I haven’t come across before (like ww.amazon.com [sic]).

This is another one of those areas where people seem to be paralyzed by their inability to create a 100% solution, and so never even get a 20% solution never mind an 80% one. You don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a state of the art search engine. A simple solution is to just log all the searches that fail, work out what they should have matched (usually it’s a simple mis-spelling – particularly if your search engine is picky about punctuation), and then add something that automatically maps all future searches for that term to the ‘correct’ version. 20 minutes a day working your way down the most popular mis-searches will catch 80% of your problem cases in 6 months …

[via Tomalak]