This week we’re exhibiting at the Internet Retailer Web Design ‘08 Conference in Miami, FL.

The theme of the event is Designing Web Sites That Sizzle - and Sell. Visit us at booth 45 for a free demonstration on how our intelligent site search and navigation solutions can improve the design and success of your web site.

I spotted that Lou Rosenfeld is running a site search analytics seminar on March 18 in Sunnyvale. I’ve chatted to Lou about this topic before and he definitely seems to know what he’s talking about. I recommend taking a look at this course if you would like to delve deeper into this very valuable area.

I came across a new search company today that I hadn’t heard of before: Velingo. It looks like they generate Related Searches to help improve the user experience. I’m a big fan of this and it’s an important and popular feature of our site search product.

It looks like Velingo is selling this as a service to web search companies. We sell our Related Searches to these companies as well- although it is a small part of our overall business. So although Velingo may be somewhat of a competitor to us I’m happy to highlight them. I hope their efforts bring more attention to, and increase demand for related searches. It’s such a useful feature.

Next week we’re exhibiting at the Channel Intelligence Retail Marketing Summit and the Shop.org Strategy and Innovation Forum (booth 203).

These two online retail events are being held in Orlando, FL between Jan 22 and Jan 24 and are a great way to start your 2008. Please come and see us if you’re at the show - we’d love to see you.

A couple of people in the SLI team spotted this thread in a web analytics forum: Question about Internal site Search. I was proud to see three different customers of ours responding (with no prompting on our end), praising our service and level of responsiveness.

We put in a lot of effort to be as responsive as we can to our customers. This gets more difficult as we get more customers. The systems we have put in place combined with the hard work of our ever growing staff have ensured that we can keep this up. Seeing feedback like this confirms to me that it is all worthwhile and I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank everyone at SLI for their wonderful work to make this happen.

Wikia Search launched this week to much fanfare. The new community-based search engine from the same people behind Wikipedia intends to shake things up for Google and other major search engines by “democratizing search” – that is, delivering results based on what USERS think is important instead of a mathematical algorithm.

I like the basic concept because it’s similar to our approach - we allow users to influence the relevance of the search results implicitly by watching what they click on and this makes a huge difference to the relevance of site search.

Wikia is searching the web and is very similar to the approach taken by our sister company Eurekster with their Swiki product. The difference is Swikis are focused around particular topics and they combine explicit and implicit voting.

Wikia’s biggest challenge is firstly getting people to contribute to improve the relevance of the results and secondly getting people to use the search. I think, despite all their venture funding and the profile of their founder they will struggle to overcome these challenges.

Chris Sherman was fairly scathing of Wikia in an article on Search Engine Land yesterday: “yet another crappy search service…”. I tend to agree even though I like the basic concept.