When lots of visitors go straight to site search
I saw a post by Joe Dolson pointing to a thread at Cre8asuteforums called "When lots of your visitors go straight to site search". The thread contains some speculation about what drives people to search - including poor navigation, and a large site. Another driver we see is some people are just search focused - [...]
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A believer
I spoke to analyst Robin Bloor from Hurwitz and Associates today. Going by his blog post today - At last, a Self-Education Search, Robin agrees with the approach we take with our Learning Search. He describes a recent bad experience of searching on Newegg (which I believe is powered by Endeca) which perfectly captures the [...]
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Survey says: consumers have low tolerance for poor search
Yesterday we announced the findings of a customer site search survey we conducted using Zoomerang. We found that more people than we realized – 73% – said they’ll leave a site in just a minute or two of not finding the product(s) they seek. 36% said that they would never return to that site and […]
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Creating a gift finder
At SLI we provide search, navigation and automated SEO services. One interesting and topical subset of the site navigation services we provide is the gift finder - a useful tool that gives people an additional way to find products that would make ideal gifts for the different people on their holiday lists. The gift finder [...]
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WebSphere search
We had an interesting experience recently with one of our customers who uses IBM's WebSphere platform (several of our customer use this). This customer found out that there was an upgrade to the WebSphere search and so they decided to replace the search that SLI was providing with the new WebSphere search. The new search [...]
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Site Search improves conversion rate at Cable Organizer
Last week Internet Retailer covered a story about how our customer, Cable Organizer, improved their conversion rate with their new site search. We've put a lot of work into their search and are elated they're seeing such positive results. Their search has multiple SKUs shown in each result, each with their own user rating. The [...]
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Improving the visibility of site search
I saw this blog post about a Web Analytics day in Brussels last week. It was interesting to see their take aways about site search, specifically: Visitors using site search are better customers. Analysts recommend improving the visibility of site search. One experiment found that by improving site search visibility 2% more visitors used site [...]
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Shop.org 2007
This week we’re exhibiting at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas, booth #417. Please come and see us if you’re at the show – we’d love to see you. I also recommend stopping by the Exact Target Booth (612). They will be presenting a case study detailing the integration of their service with both […]
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Marketing Sherpa Search Marketing Report
Marketing Sherpa released a Search Marketing report today. It contains some interesting information about search marketing but - also, a lot of information about internal search (aka site search). Some points worth noting: Analyzing internal site search terms was one of the most popular keyword research techniques identified for search marketing. One survey greatly emphasised [...]
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Site Search on the U.S. Census Bureau
Jakob Nielsen posted an interesting article today about the U.S. Census Bureau's website. The article was primarily about how fancy formatting doesn't necessarily help attract users eyes but it also contained some interesting information about site search. The users were classified into 4 groups based on how their eyes scanned the page. The largest group [...]
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