Amazon Related Searches
I noticed recently that Amazon has started showing Related Searches on their search page. I am a big fan of Related Searches. They offer a an easy, unobtrusive way of doing query refinement. This may be refining the query as "harry potter book 7" does in the example above, or offering tangential, but related queries [...]
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Tuning up site search
I spotted this presentation on tuning up site search by Chris Farnum from Enlighten at the IA Summit 2007 earlier today. It's great to see people talking about improving site search. I didn't hear the presentation - I've just seen the slide show but Chris seemed to have nicely covered off the benefits of improving [...]
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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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2007 Oscar predictions
Last year we tried to predict the Oscar winners by looking at who was searching for the nominees on our customers' sites. We only got one out of four right which is about what you'd expect with random guesses. Even though it didn't work very well, that hasn't stopped us from trying again. Here are [...]
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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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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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Why ebay does stupid ads
Have you ever seen bizarre ads from eBay? Often when you're searching you'll see an eBay ad and you wonder why eBay would want to buy the keyword you just typed. Often they can be hilarious. Here is a great collection of funny eBay ads. At eTail last week we found out why eBay does [...]
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