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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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. [...]
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Searching for brides
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 - [...]
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Eurekster gets some cash
Last week our sister company, Eurekster announced that they had received $5.5M of Venture Capital. SLI was one of the founders of Eurekster. We helped develop some of their initial technology and shared offices with them. They have been running without any serious input from us for a couple of years now and it's great [...]
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Search Engine Room
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 [...]
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Aberdeen report on site search
The Aberdeen site search report was released recently and is available for free from their site. The report emphasized the value of a high quality site search, particularly for retailers because they see direct economic benefits of having a better site search: increased conversion rates increased average order vale increased customer satisfaction. It's great to [...]
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Which box is the search?
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 [...]
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A new interface for browsing on-line stores
I came across browsegoods.com today. This uses a Google maps type of interface to browse through a reasonable size shoe collection. You can see all the shoes on one page then zoom into a category to see the shoes up close. I expanded the window to cover both my screens and it's quite cool. Even [...]
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