Today we announced that we have an expanded partner program that includes a broad range of online marketing, ecommerce platform, analytics and ratings & reviews solutions providers.
Our partner program allows online retailers to further integrate industry-leading products and services with SLI’s hosted search solution… read more
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.
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 came across these ads the other day and thought I would share them. These ran back in 1999/2000 when Snap.com was promoting itself heavily on TV. They are focusing on the fact that Snap.com used GlobalBrain technology to power their search.
Why is this relevant to site search? SLI Systems acquired the GlobalBrain technology back in 2001 and it is used in our Learning Search product.
I’ve been travelling for 4 out of the last 6 weeks and have neglected this blog for that time. I’m back now and should have a chance to do some posts soon. I’ve been to the ACCM show in Boston, the Internet Retailer Show in San Jose and I’ve been in holiday in Australia. The shows are a great opportunity to meet a lot of customers, prospects and partners in a short period of time. They are very stimulating and I’ll do separate posts on each of them.
I also enjoyed meeting some people that read this blog – including the CEO of one fo our competitors who said he finds it informative. More to come soon…
Last week our sister company, Eurekster announced that they had received $5.5M of Venture Capital. SLI was one of the founders of Eurekster. We helped develop some of their initial technology and shared offices with them. They have been running without any serious input from us for a couple of years now and it’s great to see. They have had over 50,000 swickis created.
With the capital on board they’ve now got a chance of being very successful. I wish them the very best.
Note: I referred to them as our sister company. Brother company would probably be more accurate since my brother, Grant is the largest shareholder and Chief Scientist at Eurekster.
The Aberdeen site search report was released recently and is available for free from their site.
The report emphasized the value of a high quality site search, particularly for retailers because they see direct economic benefits of having a better site search:
It’s great to see that more retailers are paying attention to their search reports and using that information to improve their search. They’re also searchandising more, i.e. using search for merchandising.
Good quality site search is a must have for retailers now. This was reflected in the report in that 96% of ecommerce sites either currently have a search tool or will install one in the next 24 months. I guess that means we will continue to be busy here at SLI.
Last year we tried to predict the Oscar winners by looking at who was searching for the nominees on our customers’ sites. We only got one out of four right which is about what you’d expect with random guesses. Even though it didn’t work very well, that hasn’t stopped us from trying again. Here are our picks for this year:
On Sunday we’ll find out how well we did this year.
I’m not happy with Yahoo. This morning Yahoo Messenger asked me if I would like to upgrade. I agreed because the old version used to crash lots. As part of the upgrade it installed the Yahoo toolbar, changed my homepage to Yahoo and changed the default search on IE7 to Yahoo. At no stage was I asked if I would like any of this. Now I’m angry at Yahoo.
I would expect this type of aggressive behavior from some dodgy screen saver software but not from a trusted company like Yahoo. The tactic will probably work and Yahoo will probably see a small bump in the number of searches it serves. However I hope this doesn’t lower the whole playing field so anytime we install anything from Microsoft or Google they change our defaults without asking us.
The Google jet was reported to have been in New Zealand over the holidays. First they thought it was Larry and Sergey, now they think it was Eric Schmidt. The day after the story first appeared a reporter rang my brother, Grant and asked if they were in the country to buy Eurekster and if he could confirm that the Google founders were in the Christchurch. Grant told them all he knew was what he’d read in the paper that day. This was reported as Grant Ryan confirming that they were in the country.
I can confirm that because of the situation Grant was in his room all day working on some numbers…. But the situation was it was raining while we were on holiday and he was doing sudoku :-).
This just goes to show that you can’t believe everything you read in the paper. The only thing we really know is that an unidentified plane landed in Christchurch during a slow news period.
As an aside – my father thought he might have met Larry and Sergey in a pub in Arrowtown on new year’s eve. On closer questioning he might have met someone called Larry – or something like that. Things are never that clear the morning after a visit to an Arrowtown pub.
