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 [...]
SLI SystemseCommerce, PressComments are off for this post
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Last week we announced our 5th birthday. Looking back, the five years seems to have gone very fast but it is a milestone we are proud to have reached. SLI was born out of the ashes of Globalbrain which had been sold to the then internet giant, NBCi. At it's peak NBCi had been the [...]
SLI SystemsMerchandisingComments are off for this post
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 [...]
Google and the other search engines allow you to specify different matching options in paid search campaigns. I would like to share some data we have collected on the different conversion rates. When people discuss these matching options they consistently say that you'll get more traffic from broad match than exact match but you'll get [...]
It's been a while since my last blog post. Things have been so busy since the last show I have struggled to find time to blog. However there has been lots happening. For starters, we've done a couple more shows, signed some new customers and hired more people. On top of that SLI turned 5 [...]
