3M sues shoplet over their site search results

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I spotted a story in Twin Cities Business blog  about 3M suing Shoplet over their site search results and thought it was worthy of a comment or two. I found this interesting because its not often you see a lawsuit talking about the relevance of site search results. Shoplet are not a customer of ours.

The crux of the story is that 3M are suing Shoplet because when you search for “Post-it” on the Shoplet site 3M’s competitors products are shown first despite the fact that the results are based on relevance. This raises the question of what does relevance mean? You can see from the screenshot below that the Universal products are shown at the top of the search results.

Maybe for the Shoplet customers the Universal products are the best (by some measure). They certainly seem cheaper than the Post-it products. It comes down to how the shoplet site search engine determines relevance. If the ranking they are showing is the best experience for the users of their site, then are shoplet doing anything wrong? The lawsuit claims that manufacturers can pay a fee to receive prominent placement on its site. Maybe this is what is happening. But getting prominent placement on the site doesn’t necessarily mean getting prominent placement within the search results for particular terms.

In my opinion, what is more damming from Shoplet’s point of view is the fact that there is a “Post It” tag on the product page for the Universal Self-Stick Notes. Tags are normally manually added as additional  information that can have a number of purposes, including:

1. Giving the users more information about the contents of the page,
2. Helping the internal search engine rank the page for the tags,
3. Acting as a navigation aid to find related information.

By putting the Post It tag on the Universal Product shoplet are explicitly saying they want this product to rank for the search term Post It. But again, if it is best for the users, is it wrong in the eyes of the law. It will be interesting to see the result of this lawsuit. Chances are we’ll never see what happens, these things tend to be settled privately.