Ulta registers for an IPO
I spotted today that one of our customers, Ulta – has registered for an IPO. It’s great to see them doing so well and I would like to publicly offer them my congratulations.
SLI Blog
Apple.com search now better.
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.
Neglected blog
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…
User reviews and search
I would like to share with you my thoughts on how user reviews can improve site search on an ecommerce site. We are seeing an increasing number of our customers allowing their visitors to write reviews and rate their products. Many are using our partners, PowerReviews or BaazarVoice to do this. On a personal level, I can see why this trend is happening; I feel more comfortable buying a product if I can read reviews first. By offering reviews on an ecommerce site it means the prospective customer doesn’t have to go somewhere else to get these. Having reviews on a site should increase conversion rates.
The additional information collected from these reviews and ratings can be used to enhance site search in the following ways:
- The ratings summary (normally 1-5 stars) can be displayed in search. In particular this draws peoples attention to the products with good ratings.
- refine and sort by rating – this allows people to more easily find products with good ratings.
- Use ratings to weight results. The idea here is to give products that have a better rating more prominence in the search. You do need to be careful with this type of approach – just because a product has a good rating doesn’t mean it’s relevant for all keywords. But where two products have similar relevance it makes sense to show the one with the better rating first. Our initial experiments with this have been positive.
- Index additional text in reviews. The reviews add additional text to your product pages. This is useful for SEO purposes but it is also potentially useful for your site search. If the text in the reviews is indexed by your site search then your visitors are going to be able to find results using a broader range of phrases.
User reviews empower people by allowing them to express themselves and influence the choices of others. This fits nicely with SLI’s Learning search which uses peoples selection from search results to improve the relevance for others. Together user reviews and site search are a nice complement.
How does Google determine if a result is valuable?
Last month I had a chance to talk to Aaron D’Souza from Google at the Search Engine Room conference. Aaron is a Software Engineer in the Search Quality group run by Matt Cutts. I asked Aaron about the new Google webmaster guideline:
- Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.
In particular I asked how Google determines whether pages “add much value for users”. Aaron’s response was that if the pages are ranking in Google then they are deemed to add value for users. I was pleased to hear this.
I described how we were concerned about a customer of ours that had over a hundred thousand search and navigation pages indexed by google even though they had less than 5000 products. We were concerned that Google may penalise them. Aaron reassured me that this was fine and suggested we use the sitemaps feature to indicate to Google which of those pages we considered the most important.
Martin Kelly just sent me the photo which prompted me to write this. He also sent this one of me giving a presentation.
Product Attributes Summit and Internet world.
We are involved in a couple of events over the next week. This involves a little travel for the ever charming Ed Hoffman. He is speaking at the Product Attribute Summit in Orlando on Friday. This is run by Channel Intelligence. Then next week he’ll be at the Internet World conference in the UK, where we’ll be exhibiting.
Breadcrumb trails
I saw Jacob Nielsen discussing the importance of breadcrumb trails and how they should be implemented.
We use the breadcrumb trail in our search and navigation solutions. It reflects the search that was done and any restrictions or facets that the user had selected. In the example below I searched for My Chemical Romance on Hot Topic, then selected Apparel then Band T-Shirts. You can see the bread crumb trail at the top reflects those selections.
We follow most of the guidelines that Jacob recommended. Because the facets don’t have any natural hierarchy we show them in the order in which they are selected. On the few times we have tried showing them in any other order we have always had complaints.
10% of site searches are spelled wrong
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.
SES New York 07
Just a quick note to say we will be exhibiting at the SES show in New York next week. If you’re in town then come by and see us at our booth. This is the first time for quite a few years that I won’t be at this show – because of family commitments. However Ed, David, Kim and Todd from SLI will be there.
As usual we’ll be giving away a shiny brass telescope so be sure to drop by booth 1122, put your card in the draw and we would love to show you what we can do.
Marketing Sherpa says Site Search is the most important page on your site
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.
