One of SLI’s tactics to provide a better search is very simple: measure quality of the search, try to improve it, then see if the metrics have improved. In a previous posting I discussed some of our other measures of search relevance. This week we’re unveiling another way of measuring search quality: our site search survey. What’s more we’re making it available free for anyone to use.

This tool allows you to put a question on your site search page asking your visitors if they found the results useful or not. They simply click Yes or No and we record the responses and make them available to you via online reports. We also provide visitors the opportunity to add feedback.

Once you have this tool on your site you have a measure of the quality of your site search which we track for you. It’s particularly useful to look at the keywords people are using when they complain and the comments they give. This allows you to understand the types of problems people are having and highlights areas that you should be improving. You can then try improving your site search and see if it has an impact on the number of complaints.

The idea for this tool was inspired by one of our customers (Veritas, I think). We were trying to put together a case study around why they chose our search. We were looking for some hard ROI numbers. But these can be hard to get and often the effort that goes into getting the numbers isn’t justified. They said the main reason they chose to keep using us after their trial was because their complaints about search stopped once they put our search up.

Our customer, Eastwood, used the feedback tool on their old search and then on their new search and saw a dramatic reduction in the amount of feedback once they upgraded their search. Their complaints dropped by 96%. With this sort of improvement you just know that the search is better.

So why are we releasing this tool for free? It’s not just because we’re generous and want to make the world a better place. We are very much a business and this may raise our profile and help us find more customers. If you sign up and look like a good fit for our technology then we’ll be in touch with you. There are lots of enhancements we could make to this tool - let us know if you have any ideas.

You can sign up to use the feedback tool here. Enjoy.

This entry was posted by Shaun Ryan on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.