I see Google has finally put the Google Suggest functionality on their home page. I’m a big fan of this feature and use it all the time in their toolbar. We’re recently started offering our equivalent functionality (that we call Auto Complete) to all of our site search customers. This is being well received - so you’ll start to see this on a lot more sites. I think before too long people will come to expect this feature from a search box. I expect people will use the feature more as they see it appearing in more and more places.

I noticed Google doesn’t have the Suggest functionality on their search results page. I expect it will come eventually.

I saw this question posed on Marchiahoo’s blog and I felt it deserved a response. My first response - is that if you’re going to ask questions on your blog then you should allow comments!

The author has being reading Steven Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think” and was questioning his assertion that site search was necessary. The reason for this was because she had read a newsletter from FutureNow: So You Think You Need an In-Site Search Engine? This newsletter quotes some comments from usability expert Jared Spool recommending that you should avoid site search because it normally doesn’t work and that people search only if the navigation is broken and doesn’t give people what they want.

I remember when Jared first started saying this years ago - I wrote a rant to him saying that the solution to broken search is to fix the search not to remove it. Apparently he got swamped by search vendors but didn’t change his opinion immediately. He seems to have softened his opinion on site search now but is advocating manually tuning results to ensure they are relevant. This approach is fine for the most popular queries but can turn into a maintenance nightmare if it’s overused or misused- you don’t want to the promotion you did for “small black ipod” in 2003 to still be active now.

Wouldn’t it be good if the search could learn from the people who use it and kept getting better? That would save the majority of the manual tweaks. It could be called Learning Search

As to the assertion that people only search when the navigation is broken - I think it is too much to expect that the navigation will work for everyone. Jared asserts that if you use the right language in your navigation then it will provide the information scent for them to follow it. This is fine - but we see from the search logs that there is a huge variety of language that is used on any site - because there is a huge variety of people. Links that provide the correct information scent for one person won’t work for another. I think it would be impossible for all but the smallest of sites to satisfy all of its visitors by navigation alone. We serve over 100 million site search queries per month - I can’t believe our customers would be better off not having a site search.

So as to the question - is site search a nice feature or not. I don’t think it’s a nice feature - I agree with Krug - it’s absolutely necessary.

Is site search the new navigation? DMV.org, an ad-driven independent Web portal known as the “Unofficial Guide to the DMV,” certainly thinks so. We announced earlier this week that DMV.org is using Learning Search to improve site search and reduce reliance on navigational tools. “More and more people depend on search alone, so we plan to spend much less time building site navigation, and much more time on search and on providing interesting news and articles for our site visitors,” DMV.org’s Raj Lahoti told us.

DMV.org receives more than five million visitors a month, and about 20 percent of those visitors use site search to find information about DMV office locations and driver license requirements, or to download forms. With such heavy traffic, and with so much information to sort through, DMV.org needed fast search, with relevant results. They initially choose Google, but Google’s site search doesn’t have the “learning” feature that SLI offers, or the high level of customer care that a growing company like DMV.org needed. (Another case where we showed that site search isn’t Google’s sweet spot – see our previous announcement about Lighting by Gregory.)

For DMV.org, fast and relevant search is the key to keeping site visitors coming back again and again, and telling their friends about the service. That translates directly into increased ad revenue for the site.

SES will be in San Jose, CA this week (August 18 - 22).

Since this is a local event for us (only 15 minutes) from our office here in Cupertino its a great opportunity to meet our team - most of our local staff will attend during the 4 day event.

How important is site search to your overall e-commerce strategy? We’d love to find out! Participate in our short survey and enter to win a $200 Apple gift voucher.

This week SLI Systems will be in Washington DC exhibiting at the eTail East conference.

If you are at the conference and would like to see a demonstration of our Site Search, Site Navigation, or User-Generated SEO products please see us at booth #55.

Aaron Wall spotted Google showing Related Searches below search results. This is his image.

I really like these - we’ve been generating them for almost a decade. They made their first appearance on the original snap.com (which later became NBCi.com) using our GlobalBrain technology. We now show them on most of our customer’s site searches. Here they are on the Travel Channel:

Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land asks how Google generates these. I’m guessing that they are popular search terms used to find that particular URL. As Barry pointed out, if you search for one of the suggestions, get more links, you’ll see the URL from SEObook ranking top.

This type of related search is reasonably popular on the site searches we host for our customers. Typically we will see about 5-10% of people who search will click on one of these links.