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.

We’ve upgraded the look and feel of the blog - apart from making it look more like our site, we have made the fonts a little larger. Hopefully you’ll find it easier to use. For those that care -we’ve also changed our blogging platform. Previously we were using Moveable Type. We’re now using WordPress.

This is an interesting site that allows you to watch what people are finding at a variety of retailers. It’s a cool gimmick but it’s not the sort of thing I could watch for long. It might be useful if you’re looking for a gift - to get some random ideas. It could then be nice to be able to filter what you’re seeing - like don’t show me any women’s clothes - or only show me women’s clothes.

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.

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.

I saw a post by Joe Dolson pointing to a thread at Cre8asuteforums called “When lots of your visitors go straight to site search“. The thread contains some speculation about what drives people to search - including poor navigation, and a large site. Another driver we see is some people are just search focused - they look for the search box on a new site when they first visit - it is (or should be) easy to find when scanning a page.

The original poster said that he put a second search box at the bottom of his navigation. He found 5% of people used it vs 25% for the one at the top. This is a good idea - it provides easy access to the search for the people that have scanned the page and not found what they were looking for.

I spoke to analyst Robin Bloor from Hurwitz and Associates today. Going by his blog post today - At last, a Self-Education Search, Robin agrees with the approach we take with our Learning Search. He describes a recent bad experience of searching on Newegg (which I believe is powered by Endeca) which perfectly captures the importance of having a good site search and highlights the difficulty of implementing site search well, even when you have bought expensive software.

At SLI we provide search, navigation and automated SEO services. One interesting and topical subset of the site navigation services we provide is the gift finder - a useful tool that gives people an additional way to find products that would make ideal gifts for the different people on their holiday lists.

The gift finder is very simple to deploy and is a tool that can generate more sales activity on your ecommerce site. It can easily be promoted on the home page or throughout the whole site, and allows people to define a set of criteria (e.g. price, occasion, recipient, gift type, etc.) and see a list of all the products that match those criteria.

The gift finder isn’t necessarily different from normal navigation – it’s just labeled in a way to be a utility for people doing their holiday (or other type) of gift shopping on your site.

We’ve found that one of the key criteria for a gift finder is having the ability to specify a price range. Most people know how much they would like to be able to spend on a gift - so the ability to see the products (ordered by popularity or by anything else that is relevant) that are within their budget is very attractive.

You can see an example of this on the Edwin Watts homepage:

This is a perfect time of year to implement a gift finder - and it can be taken down immediately after the holidays if desired.

This week we’re exhibiting at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas, booth #417. Please come and see us if you’re at the show - we’d love to see you.

I also recommend stopping by the Exact Target Booth (612). They willbe presenting a case study detailing the integration of their service with both Omniture and our Learning Search technology, to produce personalized email marketing for Ulta Cosmetics.