I’ve tested search functionality in a number of websites. One of my checkpoints is a consistency test. I locate all the locations in a website I can search from and then I run a search using the same search criteria and compare the results. If I search with the same criteria, do I get the same result s? Not always.
I find bugs when I check for consistency.
Check out this example.
If you access the front page of a well-known book selling website and query on “software testing,” you get a certain number of books in the result set. But if you create a particular type of list and then run a search on “software testing,” a smaller number of books are returned from the search.