We’re currently running a mini poll on LinkedIn. When on a site, do you search or navigate more often?  Which do you do first?  Take the poll and see the results here www.tinyurl.com/8wyuvq.

Over the past few months we have been upgrading our infrastructure to provide improved redundancy to our customers.  Specifically we’ve enhanced our geographic redundancy so there is now no single point of failure.

We’ve always had redundancy – so that if a server fails then there will be no interruption to the service of our clients. This is absolutely necessary because servers can fail – particularly disks. However we used to be vulnerable to a whole data center going off line. The data centers we use go to a lot of effort to ensure that they don’t go off line – they have multiple internet connections, a lot of redundant power systems, and lots of security. However even if they guarantee 100% up time – it doesn’t mean that you always get 100%. And despite all of these efforts we have had our data centers go off line for short periods. When this happened our customers experienced a temporary loss of service (while we execute our disaster recovery plan) and even a small loss of service is unacceptable to us so we have been looking for a solution. This upgrade is a major part of the solution.

The technique we use to achieve the geographic redundancy is the same as that used by many of the big players, like Google and Microsoft- but as far as we can tell not by our competitors – like Mercado (what’s left of them now belongs to Omniture), Atomz (now run by Omniture), ThanxMedia, or Celebros. Now if one of our data centers goes off line then the others will take the load and we will continue providing service to our customers.

This change is transparent to our customers and costs them nothing extra. It is part of our effort to continuously improve our service. Web site owners need to know that their search and navigation is going to be running continuously. Last week Evan Schuman predicted that e-commerce site crashes will soar this holiday season. This upgrade will help ensure that our customers’ sites will function continuously.

In case you missed it, last week the National Retail Federation (NRF) released the results of an ecommerce survey conducted by Shopzilla® for Shop.org, which show that a majority (56%) of online retailers expect holiday sales to increase at least 15% this year over last. While the number of retailers expecting that level of sales growth is smaller than last year (77%), the announcement highlights ways retailers are trying to drive more sales, like offering free shipping and other promotions.

The survey also revealed that retailers are improving areas of their ecommerce sites that can ensure a positive customer experience, like site search, in order to capture their share of online purchases:

“In addition to free shipping promotions, many retailers have rolled out new website features to improve the customer experience. Features like improved site search, which 42.9 percent of retailers added or improved since last holiday season, will help customers navigate sites more easily. Other features like product video (42.6%) and customer reviews (32.7%) can give shoppers more information to make buying decisions…”

These findings are very much in line with our own ecommerce survey, which we released last month. Our survey showed that a great majority of retailers viewed site search as critical in strengthening brand visibility and improving the customer experience – in fact, 91% of the retail companies we surveyed cited site search as critical, very important or important to their online businesses, while 54% said that adding new site search capabilities resulted in an increase in sales; 44% experienced greater conversion rates and 40% cited better customer satisfaction.

We’ve said it before, but now is absolutely the right time to make necessary improvements to your site search and make sure you don’t miss out on the mass numbers of people who will be spending money online this year. It will not only help you get through the holidays but will continue to have a positive impact on your business going forward – and why not take advantage of the busiest shopping time of the year to give your customers the best online experience possible?

I wanted to send out a note of caution for those of you who may be talking to someone from one of our competitors, Thanx Media. Take what you hear from them with a grain of salt. We are getting mounting evidence that they are not being truthful to our customers and prospects.

By way of background, Thanx Media started selling Endeca on demand in April this year. Endeca’s search and navigation software is a good fit if you want to own the software, you have a capable IT team that can install and maintain it, you are prepared to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and you are not in a hurry (Rugs Direct said it took months to install Endeca). Endeca can’t be that easy to set up, even for insiders – Endeca’s chief scientist and co-founder recently admitted that he wasn’t “quite ready to figure out how to install and maintain an Endeca instance” for his blog.

A lot of our customers are very faithful. They forward emails and voice mails from our competitors and we’ve even sat in on some of their sales pitches that our customers couldn’t be bothered listening to. This is where we have seen the Thanx Media reps being untruthful:

• They exaggerate about their customer numbers. You can see in this job posting they imply they have 400 customers, whereas in this press release they claimed 28 new customers 6 months after they started selling their service. I’m guessing ThanxMedia have closer to 28 customers – it’s Endeca who have the 400 odd.
• They overstate the wins they have had against us. In April (just after they launched) they were claiming in emails to our customers that they had won many SLI customers when I doubt they had any customers at all.
• They are uninformed about our capabilities. A new customer expressed surprise that we were able to implement faceted search in the way that we did – the Thanx Media rep had told him that we wouldn’t be able to.

I know sales people can sometimes be economical with the truth to get a sale. But when it comes to this, the Thanx media reps seem to be having an economic crisis :-). I’m guessing that this is a reflection of the pressure they are being subject to. It smells a little of desperation to me. Endeca may be one of the enterprise search companies that Stephen Arnold suggested was in trouble – they did have to raise more capital earlier this year.

Endeca is an enterprise software company. Thanx Media is trying to fit the square peg of enterprise software into the round hole of Software as a Service. Mercado tried this and it didn’t work.

I welcome competition – they help keep us on our toes and ensure that we strive to provide the best service. My own ethics dictate that we should be engaged in honest competition and our business model encourages this. If we can’t deliver what we promise then our customers will see this in our free trial, before they have paid anything. This approach is working well for SLI. If ThanxMedia is talking to you about SLI, all I ask is that you talk to us to hear a different perspective.

SLI Systems CEO Shaun Ryan speaks to Melissa Campanelli of eM+C about the importance of Site Search within an ecommerce site http://www.emarketingandcommerce.com/podcasts.

As we highlighted in a previous post, we recently conducted a survey of 322 retailers asking them about the tools they give top priority to when it comes to online marketing. We were happy to find that site search and SEO are two of the top three technologies of choice for retailers today (email marketing was the third). What we didn’t mention was that, as an incentive to take the survey, we offered a $200 Apple gift voucher to one lucky winner.

We’re happy to report that Michelle Thomas of Zappos won the survey drawing and is the recipient of some new Apple merchandise.

In addition to completing our survey, Michelle’s colleague, Aaron Magness has been kind enough to accept our request to be featured on an upcoming eCommerce Podcast. In the interview, we hope to uncover a bit about the online marketing strategies Zappos has implemented to help them become the recognizable brand they are today. Stay tuned…

Yesterday we announced that WEBS has implemented our Learning Search to power the site search on its all-things knitting ecommerce site Yarn.com. Aside from strengthening its online brand visibility and improving the customer experience, WEBS has discovered another benefit to an effective site search solution – more productive employees. According to owner Steve Elkins, employees are better able to find information on the company’s more than 15,000 products, which helps them market them better.

Elkins also said that they use our site search to create special landing pages for groups of products, and direct recipients of WEBS marketing e-mails to these pages by individual URLs.

I interviewed Elkins recently on our Ecommerce Podcast. Steve talks about how he and his wife took over the business from Steve’s parents and shares some interesting marketing techniques that have helped grow Yarn.com’s traffic (like podcasting). He also talks about the key technologies (like site search) that have improved their website. (Side note: you may be surprised to find out what Steve’s first online purchase was. Hint: think little blue box.)

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.