We recently released an autocomplete feature that’s been picked up by many of our clients. This uses previous user’s searches (in aggregate) to automatically create keyword suggestions, which are then displayed in order of popularity. It is really fast too. Head over to cableorganizer.com if you want to see it in action.

Prior to the release we had trouble estimating how often people would use it. We couldn’t find any usage stats out there we could use as a baseline. While it is still early days, it is currently being used 20% of the time, and on average people are saving themselves from typing about eight characters each time. Saving a few keystrokes is great, but the real benefit appears to be helping people use search terms that are hard to spell – spelling suggestions are required much less often on sites with this technology. This means more people are finding what they want the first time, which has to be a good thing.

We strive to continually improve the service that we offer our customers. One part of that is ensuring that the search and navigation pages load quickly. The graph below shows how the average time (to serve the complete search page) for one of our customers has improved over the last 12 months.

Even though this customer has a complex search, we thought 2 seconds was a little slower than we would like. We’re much happier with it sitting below half a second.

The changes that you can see are improvements to our algorithms and the configuration of our servers. They are examples of improvements that all of our customers receive the benefit of (with no additional cost to them).

Today we’re announcing that Spencer’s and its sister company, costume retailer Spirit Halloween are using our Learning Search and Site Champion services. Spencer’s sells humorous gifts and Spirit Halloween sells costumes.

The two e-commerce sites (the company also operates brick-and-mortar locations around the country) see their biggest traffic around Halloween and Christmas. It’s important that we are able to handle these seasonal spikes to ensure that their customers can always find just the right products.

Jay Greenberg, director of ecommerce for Spencer’s, had been an SLI customer at his previous position at Franklin Electronics, and was so happy with our service that he advocated using us at his new company. We’ve seen this several times - when individuals move companies. For me this underscores the importance of ensuring that our customers receive the best service that they can.

You can read more details about Spencer’s and its choice of SLI here: Spencer’s and Spirit Halloween Improve Customer Experience on the Web Using Learning Search and Site Champion From SLI Systems.

Steven Seiller wrote an article outlining the 11 things he hates about site search. He makes some good points and captures the passion that people feel when site search isn’t there, can’t be found, or doesn’t work.  You need to have site search, make it highly visible and it should be flawless. This is not easy to do and the disappointing thing is that if you do it well most visitors won’t notice it (people notice things that don’t work properly) - but they will be happier and will get more from your site.

I may sound like a broken record here - but if you want to improve your site search we would love to show you what we can do. Contact us and we’ll try to dazzle you.

Avi Rappoport did an excellent post on search log junk. This is the set of queries that aren’t very useful  when you’re analyzing search logs, mostly from crawlers, hackers and spammers. We see a lot of these types of queries and constantly trying to block them and remove them from our reporting - so we can extract useful information. I hadn’t seen anyone talking about this before - but it is something else you need to be aware of when you’re trying to extract the valuable information that is in search logs.

Last week Coremetrics announced that they making free ecommerce data available to their customers for benchmarking. Their announcement included some sample data including the fact that 15% of consumers used site search, resulting in a conversion rate of 5.6%. The conversion rate is interesting when compared to some of the other conversion rates in the sample data: from natural search traffic the conversion rate is 1.66%; from comparison shopping engines and affiliate networks it is 1.97%; and from direct load it is 3.29%.

This is yet more evidence showing that the conversion rates for people who use site search are relatively high.

As to the question around the value of the benchmarks - I think they’re still worth having even though it is hard to compare because of the variety of ways of measuring metrics like conversion rates.

Last week we sent out our latest edition of Telescope on Search, our monthly email newsletter on; site search, seo, search engine marketing and usability.

The March 2008 Newsletter contains:

• Black Forest Decor Discovers the Importance of Site Search Size and Placement - An article that highlights the benefits received by increasing the size and improving the location of the site search box.
• Recent conferences where we are exhibiting, including some special discount offers.

The image below is how the site looked before the site search box was changed.

The image below is how the site looks after the changes to the site search box.

To read the complete newsletter click here. You can subscribe to our newsletter at our newsletter page.

I spotted this post touting the benefits of mining your site search. It’s a point I’ve made before but it’s valuable and worth repeating - your site search logs are a fantastic source for keyword research. It’s worth looking at these to get keyword lists for PPC & SEO. And you should be looking at them to make sure that you have good results on your internal search for the terms people are actually using.

Google’s new Search within a Search offering seems to be getting a fair amount of attention, but not necessarily for the right reasons The New York Times piece this week: A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites touches on some issues that should be of concern to retailers. A recent blog by Alan Rimm-Kaufman: Google To Vegetarians: Eat The Damn Hamburger was a little more blunt

In my mind the best outcome from this is that it gets people thinking more about site search. It highlights the difference in the quality of Google’s search within a site compared with the site’s own search. I’m always amazed at how many sites have terrible search (this is why we’re in business). For these sites the new Google offering could be a benefit by making it possible for people to use Google to search their site. Although there are concerns about competitors ads showing on these results. However for those sites that have a good quality site search it will be vastly superior to the Google site restricted search and this feature will not be very useful. In essence, the new Google search-within-a-search takes control away from the retailer (or publisher, or whatever entity’s site is being searchedHere are the drawbacks that I see

1. The Google-provided search results will not have the visual appeal that other quality site search offerings provide – e.g. they don’t include images or other visually appealing elements
2. Because Google doesn’t understand the structure of the data on a company’s site, the search won’t allow for things like merchandising, sorting, refinements or promotional copy
3. Google does not index every page of every site, and they often don’t have recently launched or added products, so a user might use the Google site search feature and be misled into thinking the site doesn’t have the item they seek, when it could just be that Google’s indexer is not up-to-date
4. Relevance of the search results is key – if the user does type a term into the search box, how relevant are the results that come back? They could actually lead the user away from the retailer’s site, and cause the company to miss out on a conversion that their real site search solution would have generated

The other major issue is that it will likely backfire with Google’s advertisers. By increasing their control over users who have done a brand query for ‘Best Buy’ or ‘REI’ and then showing ads for those companies’ competitors on subsequent Google search-within-a-search results pages, Google is now directly competing with their retailing advertisers (and other sites) and diluting the brands of these sites. And, they’re potentially leading the user to a competitor’s site via their ad. In my view, this is not good practice – it doesn’t benefit the user and it certainly doesn’t benefit the retailer.

Ideally Google will allow the site owner to control whether or not this box appears for them. They could do this through the webmaster tools. An even more useful feature would be to allow the site owners to specify the search form - so they could send people to their own site search. It would be interesting to see if Google would allow this - because it would remove the opportunity for them to make revenue from the ads on these pages.

If nothing else, I hope this prompts site owners to look at the quality of their site search - they should make sure its delivering relevant results that are well presented. Whether people search their site through Google or on the site directly, companies need to make sure people have an easy path to finding the items they seek. Usability experts back up what we’ve been saying for years - ‘if they can’t find it, they can’t buy it.’

Last week Liana Evans of Search Marketing Gurus blogged about a recent Bon Jovi concert she attended. She drew several parallels between her concert experience and the interactions/experiences consumers have with companies vis a vis their marketing efforts, which were well thought out and struck a similar nerve in our thinking about search. So we decided to expand upon her analogies and show how her concert experience might also help with site search planning (and no, we didn’t see the concert, but it sounds like we missed out!).

1. Make sure your messages are heard and understood - at the concert, people had a hard time hearing/understanding Chris Daughtry’s singing. Liana says that for marketing, this equates to making sure your audience is hearing your messages correctly.
- For site search, this means making sure the messages in the search results are consistent with your marketing messages, and also making sure results are relevant. It also means providing a good user interface, and bolding the keyword in the search results so people understand why the result ties back to their search term.

2. Can everyone see the show? - Liana talks about how obstructions on stage made it hard for people to see the show. She says that for marketing, this means making sure your web site and all its images are viewable in all the different browsers, etc.
- For site search, this means making sure you’re giving people the right results they came to your site to find. In other words, once again, make sure the results are relevant, and that you’re offering them the products they expect.

3. Distractions from the message – Similar to #2 above, Liana says that for marketing, you should make sure that there aren’t parts of your site that are distracting to your customers – like meaningless videos, images, etc.
- For site search, this means making sure you keep superfluous information out of the search results – for example, a once common practice was to include stars that rated the results (different from customer ratings) and file sizes, both of which just distract the customer’s attention.

4. Get the crowd involved – similar to a crowd singing along to their favorite Bon Jovi songs. Liana writes that for marketing, this means making sure you get customer feedback about how you’re doing.
- For site search, this also means getting customer feedback about how their search experience was (SLI offers a Feedback Tool (for free) that does just that). SLI’s Learning Search is another way to “get the crowd involved” – as our search tool ranks results based on what previous site visitors clicked on most. Crowd involvement is what makes our search get better and better over time.

5. Using the familiar to introduce the new - for example, singing old, familiar songs to bring out new songs. Liana says that for marketing, this means leveraging past successes when introducing new products.
- For site search, this can mean 2 different things: 1) if you want to promote new items in search results, be sure to couple them with familiar, popular items; and 2) when introducing a new feature in your search results (i.e. keyword-specific banners, or a gift finder), make sure you maintain some of the same elements that people are comfortable with and have come to expect. This is also an important point when considering measurement – if you make significant changes everywhere all at one time, it’s impossible to measure the results of any one change.

6. Change is good! – just like when Richie Sambora sang one of Bon Jovi’s popular hits, normally sung by Jon Bon Jovi himself. As Liana says, for marketing, this means trying new things even when things are working.
- The same applies to site search. An example is how one of our customers (Black Forest Décor) changed the placement and size of its search box to see if it would improve how well the search worked. The search already worked really well, but making it bigger and moving it to the center of the page made it even more effective.

7. With age comes experience – in her post, Liana compares the singing skills of veteran Jon Bon Jovi with newcomer Chris Daughtry. For marketing, she says this means relying on the wisdom of experts when trying new strategies.
- For site search, this means relying on a search engine that has gained expertise over time – e.g. Learning Search, which gets better and better the more it’s used (as described above in #4). It’s also worth working with people and companies that have been around for a long time and are experts in search (or marketing). Like the members of Bon Jovi, many of the folks at SLI today were involved with search back in the 80s – and we also had longer hair back then.