We’re now powering the site search on Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land. Danny has requested a slightly different format to normal – with the facets at the bottom. You can get to them by clicking the more options link beside the sorting options:

Most of our customers have the facets either at the top, or the left hand side. Those that want to conserve space will either use drop down for the facets or use java script to hide them (e.g. see Edwin Watts). Danny’s approach is different but not one I would recommend to most of our customers – almost no one uses the facets at the bottom of the search engine land page.

Search Engine Land is a relatively new site. Danny started it when he left Search Engine Watch late last year. Because it is new it doesn’t have that much content yet – but is getting bigger every day. It is interesting watching the top search terms. iCrossing has been popular – mainly because they were having a few issues with the company and Danny inadvertently gave people a forum to vent their frustrations in the Searcharazzi section. Disapointingly he shut it down – things were getting interesting.

Danny is the long time coordinator of the Search Engine Strategies show. Next week is the San Jose show. This is going to be the last one that Danny will be organizing. We will be exhibiting there and would love to see you if you’re at the show.

This week we announced that FTD is using our learning search. They are one of the oldest and largest floral companies in the world and we are proud to have them as a customer. With Learning Search you now see red roses when you search for red roses and thousands of other search terms return relevant results.

I had previously pointed out that the apple.com search sucked. They’ve now upgraded it and it is much better. In typical Apple style they have innovated with site search but I still think they could do better.

The innovation is an AJAX search interface. The search starts to show results as you type, – they appear directly below the search box. Apple aren’t the first people to have done this but it is the most prominent site I’ve seen that is using this approach. As you would expect their implementation is fast and slick.

You can still type a keyword in, hit the enter key and see results. This is the traditional search paradigm. So they have added to that rather changed the paradigm – which is good. A lot of people that attempt to do AJAX use the opportunity to break traditional user interfaces. This can produce cool but ultimately useless interfaces – if most people can’t work out how to use them.

There are still some problems with their search. The first is that they categorize the search results. They show results from products, apple store (not really sure what the difference between those two is), downloads, itunes, support then company. This means that if the most relevant result is not in the products category then it won’t be shown at the top. A search for nano support for example has the most relevant page – the nano support page almost at the bottom of the search results.

Another problem with the results is relevance. Relevance is the most important aspect of search. Take a look at the top 5 results for ipod – not an ipod in sight – but I’m sure they sell them:

The search results also don’t have price, sorting options and only limited ability to refine the results.

We put together some interesting stats from across a handful of our clients on misspellings on internal search. We used a broad definition of a misspelling. If a search phrase contained a word which is not on the site then we count it as a misspelling. Obviously this will also include words that are spelled (or spelt?) correctly but just aren’t on the site. For example if you search for “razor” on Tupperware.com it’s not on the site anywhere so we would count that as a misspelling even though razor is spelled correctly. So this yields an upper limit.

The average was 10% of queries contained a word that wasn’t in the index. This was higher than I was expecting and emphasises the importance of having a spell checker on your site search and of paying attention to your search terms that have poor results (which is a larger set than the terms which contain words that aren’t in the index). Interestingly the client with the lowest rate of misspellings is one that pays a lot of attention to our report that shows search terms with poor results and regularly updates their synonyms to try and improve these.

I was listening to a practical ecommerce podcast yesterday where Mitch Bettis interviewed Anne Holland from MarketingSherpa asking for marketing tips for eCommerce sties. It’s a good interview The thing that caught my attention is Anne said that their research showed that the single most important page on your site is the site search page.

Anne said there are many things you can do that will have an impact on your ecommerce business – but you should focus first on those that have the biggest impact. Site Search is one of those. She also said co-registration was a very, very effective tactic for building out email lists.

We can’t help you find a bride – but we can help brides find wedding favors, gifts and accessories. This week we announced three bridal sites that are using the SLI search: American Bridal, Island Wedding Shop and Fairy Tale Wedding Shop. Island and Fairy Tale Wedding shops are run by Cyber Island shops – who run ten specialty ecommerce stores.

I’m pleased to hear that our search has been helping these businesses and am looking forward to having them as customers for many years.

I’ve just been speaking at the Search Engine Room conference in Sydney. This is the first search marketing even I’ve been to in Australia. It was interesting to compare the Australian attitudes and knowledge to those I see in the US. There were a handful of familiar faces from SES and similar shows: Stephan Spencer from Net Concepts, David Warmuz from Trellian, and Lee Odden from TopRank.

The Aussie search marketers appear to be as well informed as their US counterparts – they read all the same blogs and forums. They’re talking about the same issues. Their biggest challenge is educating the market about the benefits of search marketing. Michael Edwards gave a presentation about the mission he had selling the benefits of SEO and what needed to be done, to all the internal stakeholders at travel.com.au. And he’s their marketing manager. US search marketers have the same issues but because more of them have been doing it for longer there is more awareness in the US.

I came away encouraged by what I saw and excited by the opportunities in the Australian market.

Do you ever find that you are typing in the wrong box when you’re trying to use the site search? Many sites are so eager for people to subscribe to their newsletter or RSS feed that the text box asking for their email address is more prominent than their site search.

People that are search focused will visually scan the page looking for the site search box. This is often easier to do than scanning the text and trying to navigate the site. I’ll often find that I’ll pick the wrong box and start typing my search term where an email address is expected.

This is more an inconvenience than anything. I haven’t seen any data on whether or not this has an impact on conversion rates. Tamar Weinberg recently blogged about this with some excellent examples. If you have a subscribe box on your site it would be fairly easy to estimate how much of a problem this is by examining how many incorrectly formed email address are passed through the subscribe form.

My general advice on this is:

• Your search box should be near the top of your page and above any other text boxes.
• If you’re going to have non search text boxes on your site then add plenty of cues as to the purpose of the box.

A nice example of the latter is on our customer’s site, Blair. The subscribe text box has three cues.

1. An image of an envelope above the box
2. The text “Enter E-mail Address” in the text box (which is cleared once the focus goes on the box)
3. An example email below the box.

All of these reduce the chance that you would mistake that for a search box.

Another tactic I often see is placing text inside the search box, inviting you to search. You can see an example of this on the Cell Phone Shop:

I’m in two minds about whether or not this is a good thing to do. When you do this you’ll almost always see the text in that box appear in the list of popular search terms. But it is really no different than people doing empty searches (in either case you should make sure the page shows something sensible). I’d be interested in your thoughts as to whether this is a good idea or not.