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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The Long Tail: Chris Anderson at eTail
At eTail last week Chris Anderson spoke on the long tail. Chris is the editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of the book The Long Tail. He described how the most popular things are way more popular than the less popular ones and when you chart them you get the power law graph […]
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Related Search on Google and MSN: Good for Users & Search Engine’s Revenue
I noticed that Google are experimenting more with related search and someone had spotted an ad where MSN was touting their related search (sorry, I can't find the link to this). This is good for users and for the search engine's bank balance. It's good for the users because related search is useful and really [...]
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Apple.com search sucks
Apple is one of the most visited ecommerce sites. They have an image of being slick and user friendly. I had high expectations of their website – which they meet for the most part: their product pages show off their products wonderfully and it is easy to shop. However their search is terrible. I was […]
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Cyber Monday
So how big was Cyber Monday? I took a look at the search traffic on a handful of our retail customers' sites and compared their search traffic on Monday November 27 to their average search traffic for the 3 months before Thanksgiving. On average there were 90% more searches on Cyber Monday compared to the [...]
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Alexa vs Search traffic
Lots of people criticize the reliability of the Alexa toolbar - see the comments on Matt Cutts' blog or more recently from Om Malik. I would like to offer some qualified support for the Alexa toolbar - with some data to back it up. At SLI we run the site search for lots of sites [...]
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Searching for search on Technorati
Stephan Spencer sent this through to me. You've got to laugh - a search for "Internal Search" on Technorati returns a Search Error :). It is working now - but it is amazing how useless the results are.
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Ajax 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 [...]
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Grid vs List view for search results
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 [...]
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More on site search vs 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 [...]
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