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SLI Blog

Learning Navigation

Posted by Shaun RyaneCommerce, Navigation, Navigation Tips, Press

This week we launched our Learning Navigation service. This is a natural extension to our Learning Search service. Learning Navigation makes it easier for your visitors to find what they’re looking for while they’re navigating your site because it brings the popular products to the top at all stages of the navigation.

We’ve designed the Learning Navigation with search engine optimization in mind:

  • The navigation pages have search engine friendly links – i.e. not too many parameters and there are useful keywords in the links themselves.
  • The navigational pages are easily crawlable – every valid combination of facets can be found by the spiders.
  • The navigation pages have meaningful titles that accurately describe the contents of the page.

    These are all fairly simple techniques which for some reason a lot of sites don’t follow. For example look at this URL from home depot (an Endeca customer):
    http://www.homedepot.com/prel80/HDUS/EN_US/diy_main/pg_diy.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@0696099881.1161203966@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccdaddjeejdfhdcgelceffdfgidglm.0&CNTTYPE=PROD_META&CNTKEY=misc/searchResults.jsp&MID=9876&N=2984+6633&pos=n10

    It’s frighteningly ugly and the page contains frames which makes it even more difficult for search engines. Home depot have had to create pages such as this so the search engines can index their content. This is a very bland page and should a person happen to find it when searching on Google I’m sure the conversion rate will be lower than it would be if this was their standard “Kids room” page (which is impossible to link to but here is an image). By making your navigation pages crawlable and search engine friendly you can eliminate the need to devise other schemes for getting your content indexed and the navigation pages themselves can rank well and serve as great landing pages.

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    Preparing for the holidays

    Posted by Shaun RyanPress

    This is a busy time of the year for us. We’re busy because our customers are busy preparing for their busy time – the holidays. It’s busy, busy busy. Last year we saw that on average, the number of site search queries in the holidays was over 2.5 times higher than it was in September. The traffic starts coming almost immediately after Thanksgiving.

    So any changes retailers are doing to sites are being done now. We’re busy responding to customer requests to tweak their search and update the look and feel of their sites. We’ve also had a couple of customers change their platform in the last week. On top of that we have a large number of new customers coming on board. We’re adding additional servers to our clusters to handle the increased holiday load. The good thing about having done this for a few years now is that we know what to expect.

    Some of our customers are in the middle of their peak season at the moment. In particular, those with Halloween merchandise. Their traffic starts to ramp up in early August and, not unexpectedly, drops dramatically on November 1.

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    Ajax Search

    Posted by Shaun RyanAjax, Site Search

    There is growing interest in using Ajax with search.

    Google is experimenting with it at Searchmash.com. Microsoft are using it on Windows Live Search and Amazon are using Ajax on A9. Eurekster are using Ajax to allow users to change the search results on Swikis and Snap are using it to display search suggestions.

    Ajax technology allows the search engines to send and receive information in the background and display the new information without refreshing the page. This allows features such as infinite scrolling, where more results are fetched in the background and added to the existing results, either when you get close to the bottom or when you click to see the next page. You can also fetch more information about results when you mouse over them or click on a portion of them. For example Ask do this, mouse over the binoculars icon on their search results and they show a screen shot of the page.

    We first looked at this type of technology back in 2000. Back then we were using Flash rather than Ajax (the project was called Gordon – we thought it would save every one of us), but the concept was the same. The Flash code would render the search results and make requests to the server for more information. This would enable features such as continuous scrolling and showing additional information when you moused over a search result or a search suggestion. We even had search results and suggestions flying in and out of the page as you did different searches.

    We found that it was fairly easy to create these cool features but they added little, if anything to the search experience for the end user. There is quite a lot of risk in creating non-standard user interfaces. The main risk is that too many people won’t understand what’s happening and the search experience will be degraded. Microsoft’s Live search did have infinite scrolling when it was in beta but it is no longer there. I think the real opportunity here is not to create new user interfaces for the search results but rather to speed things up by not having to refresh the whole page and potentially by making subtle improvements to the existing user interface.

    It will be interesting to see whether any Ajax powered features will become common place in site search. This is one area we will be keeping a close eye on.

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    Chiasso and PC Universe in the news

    Posted by Shaun RyaneCommerce, Press

    I noticed a couple of our customers in the news this week. PC Universe won a web award. We power their search and one of our partners, Left Click Labs, has recently helped them redesign their site. Well done to Tom, Patrick and the team at PC Universe.

    I also saw Chiasso featured in this story about site search in the Stores Magazine.

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    Grid vs List view for search results

    Posted by Shaun RyaneCommerce, Site Search

    We continuously try to improve our best practices around site search. Recently we’ve been looking at layout options. Specifically, which is the best layout grid or list.

    The grid view is more compact and so allows you to show more products above the fold. It is potentially easier to browse through many results using this format, particularly if the images adequately summarize the results. On the other hand, the list view gives you more room to show additional information about each product. In particular you can show descriptive text, related information and add to cart buttons. The text gives you an opportunity to further entice the user to click on the result. If you highlight the search term then it provides a strong information scent indicating that the result is relevant for the given term.

    It’s interesting to look at how the distribution of clicks varies between the two different options. This chart shows the number of clicks that occur at each rank when the results are ordered in a list view.
    list_view.jpg
    As expected the top ranked result gets the majority of clicks and this falls away fairly quickly. This particular client has 10 results per page. This is reflected in the chart in that the 11th result gets significantly less clicks than the 10th result because a lot of people don’t visit the 2nd page of results. You can also see that the 10th result gets about the same number of clicks as the 9th. I suspect this is because it is at the bottom of the page and easier to find than if it were the 10th result in a long list. For some customers we see the result at the bottom of the page get more clicks than the result 2nd from the bottom.

    Contrast this with results that are shown in a grid view (in this case 3 rows of 4 results):
    gridrank.jpg
    Here you can see that the number of clicks doesn’t fall away as fast as they did in the list example above. Interestingly the 5th result (which is below the 1st result) still gets less clicks that the 4th result (which is at the end of the first row). I had though it might get more if a reasonable amount of people scanned the list vertically. However this supports the premise that the results are scanned from left to right.

    Our customers are reasonably evenly split between showing the results in the grid and list views. Many of them allow the users to switch between the two. Our analysis indicates there is no significant difference in the conversion rates of the two formats.

    So which should you use? The charts above summarize the activities of thousands of people. My advice is to ask some of them and if possible test the alternatives. Personally, when I’m searching I prefer to have more information on the search results page because that makes it easier to make a decision without having to click through. That saves me time.

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    More on site search vs web search

    Posted by Shaun RyanSite Search, Web Search

    Following on from my earlier post speculating that there are way more site searches than web searches. Why is it that we hear so much less about site search? Both site search and web search are important for a site owner – web search helps drive people to the site, while site search helps people find what they want on a site. With more people using site search than web search, it is arguably more important.

    I think the reason site search gets less coverage in the press is because there are no big players to focus on. Web search is dominated by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. The average user knows these brands and feels an impact if they change the way their search works. What’s more the investment community follows these companies closely because they account for the majority of revenue associated with web search.

    On the other hand the responsibility of site search is spread across all web sites. There are a handful of vendors, such as SLI who are responsible for the search on an increasing number of sites. But there is no-one that has the dominance that Google has with web search. Over the next few years there will probably be a site search vendor who will serve more queries than Google. It will be interesting to see if they get anywhere near the attention.

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    Site search vs web search

    Posted by Shaun RyanPress, Site Search, Web Search3 comments

    What type of searching is more common: web search (using Google, Yahoo, et al) or searching within a site?

    The number of web searches done daily is approximately 200 million. Google gets about half of those about 90 million. At SLI we serve site search for only a tiny fraction of all web sites but on some days we serve over 20 million site search queries. This indicates to me that there are significantly more site search than web search queries .

    You can look at this another way – look at the most popular sites on the internet – a few of the top sites are search engines – Yahoo, Google, MSN – then you start getting into myspace, ebay, amazon, craigslist and youtube – a lot of people using those will be doing searches on those sites.

    When you start looking down the list of top sites and you realize that almost all of these has a site search, it quickly becomes evident that site search must occur a lot more than web search. My guess is that there would be at least an order of magnitude more site searches done, .i.e. more than 2 billion/day!

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    Danny Sullivan leaving search engine watch

    Posted by Shaun RyanPress, Site Search

    Danny Sullivan announced that he was leaving search engine watch this week. The main reason was that Incisive Media, the owner weren’t letting him share in the wealth he was creating for them. This is a major blow for Incisive because, although Danny has built up a great team he is the soul of Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conferences. It will be interesting to see how the site and conferences go without him. This will depend somewhat on what Danny does with any alternative conferences post SEW. SLI will definitely take a close look at participating in any conference he is involved with.

    Recently I have been relying more and more on the daily searchcast to keep up with the search news. I’m pleased to hear Danny is going to continue doing the searchcast after he leaves.

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    Merchandising noise

    Posted by Shaun RyanMerchandising

    There has been a lot of noise recently from our competitors about merchandising. We see it in their marketing and we hear it from our prospective customers. Our competitors are saying that they offer merchandising controls and we don’t. I have found this to be an interesting exercise and I must admit initially I was confused as to what they were talking about – I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what they meant. We host the search for over 100, predominantly e-commerce sites and usually cater to all their requests. So what could these mysterious merchandising features be?

    I did some research, including sitting in on a couple of our competitors webinars (using the deceptive pseudonym of Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems, Inc). It ends up we already offer most of the merchandising features they were talking about – we just don’t call them by the same name.

    So, to clear up the confusion, we have set up a page summarizing some of our merchandising capabilities. We’re going to be updating it and linking to examples of our customers who are taking advantage of these capabilities. If you take a look I think you’ll find we’re extremely competitive. Watch this space – there’s more coming.

    The lesson from this – if you’re looking to buy site search (or anything for that matter) don’t always believe what one vendor says about the other. Unless of course you’re talking to us :-).

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