Guidelines to design a No result search page
No result page for search are dead ends. Are there any existing guidelines or research results on effective no result search pages ?
Here is what i have so far.
Typography
Use proper typography and font-sizes to make sure that the user perfectly and easily understand that there are no results matching user's query.
Suggestions
- Give spelling suggestions in case of misspelled words ( just like google does)
- Suggest the other results that closely matches the search query
- Advice about how to modify queries, using different words or fewer words
- Providing a search box (with the original query still in it for easy editing)
Others
Show top search results , or most common searches just to guide the user to a new path just in case user has hit the dead end.
Say sorry , for no results ( ? )