Technology Evangelist spotted that Yahoo is trying a new search interface at AllTheWeb. I love seeing this type of experimentation and am always looking for new ideas that we might be able to apply to site search. Google has a similar test area at searchmash.com.

The Yahoo experiment has an ajax search box that shows the search results after you complete each word with out having to hit enter. It also shows suggestions below which you can use the arrows to navigate to. Once you navigate to a suggestion the search results appear without you hitting enter. X1 from IdeaLab has some similar concepts for their desktop search (which powers the Yahoo desktop search). The main difference here is X1 does partial matching on a word – so will show you results as soon as you start typing, whereas this interface waits until you’ve typed a word.

I wasn’t overwhelmed by this and I doubt this type of search will be widely used unless it improves significantly. It is difficult to try to change the model of how search works that people have in their head. Currently this is something like – you type words in and press enter – or the search button.

People are used to having previous searches appear below the search box. This has been a feature provided by browsers for years. However Yahoo’s implementation is non-standard because the search appears as soon as you navigate to the suggested search. If you press enter it returns to the previous search you did. This seemed confusing to me. Even though it’s not perfect I think it’s great they’re experimenting and trying out different ideas.

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 – who run ten specialty ecommerce stores.

I’m pleased to hear that our search has been helping these businesses and am looking forward to having them as customers for many years.

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 like star wars or lord of the rings. Related Searches are easy to use – you just click on them. They are unobtrusive – they only take up a line or two of text – so you can still see relevant search results above the fold. They are also very popular. We see about 25% of people who search will use the related searches.

I often recommend that people look to see how Amazon are doing things when they are making design decisions because Amazon put so many resources to put into testing so they can get the usability right. Even usability guru Jakob Nielsen defers to them, for example his newsletter today he cited Amazon as a positive example for the easiest way to enter state codes

In this case I take it as a complement that Amazon has finally started offering a feature which we have offered all of our site search customers for years. For example here’s a screen shot showing the related searches for tulips on FTD:

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 site search for corporate, ecommerce and enterprise search. I was very pleased to see him encouraging people to look at their search logs and using them as a guide to improve the search experience. In my experience this can be very productive. There were a couple of things he didn’t explicitly mention in the slide show – although he may have talked about:

1. Using click through on results to improve the relevance, e.g. if most people are clicking on the 10th result when they search for “swim wear” then maybe that result should be at the top.

2. The opportunity of using the site search logs for keyword research for search marketing. Enlighten is a search marketing agency so I’m sure he’s aware of this and would have mentioned it in his presentation.

I didn’t see any mention of objective measures of search relevance. Some measures we use include:

• Average rank – how far down the results people go on average

• Average click through rate – if the results are good people will probably be clicking on them
• Percentage of people clicking on the first 5 results.
• Conversion rate of people who search (for an ecommerce site)

The nice thing about having objective measures like this is that you can then make changes to the search and see if the objective measures improve.

Because of the audience the presentation is naturally a little technical, however I think it’s worth taking a look at.

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 to see. They have had over 50,000 swickis created.

With the capital on board they’ve now got a chance of being very successful. I wish them the very best.

Note: I referred to them as our sister company. Brother company would probably be more accurate since my brother, Grant is the largest shareholder and Chief Scientist at Eurekster.

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 from Net Concepts, David Warmuz from Trellian, and Lee Odden from TopRank.

The Aussie search marketers appear to be as well informed as their US counterparts – they read all the same blogs and forums. They’re talking about the same issues. Their biggest challenge is educating the market about the benefits of search marketing. Michael Edwards gave a presentation about the mission he had selling the benefits of SEO and what needed to be done, to all the internal stakeholders at travel.com.au. And he’s their marketing manager. US search marketers have the same issues but because more of them have been doing it for longer there is more awareness in the US.

I came away encouraged by what I saw and excited by the opportunities in the Australian market.

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:

1. increased conversion rates

2. increased average order vale
3. increased customer satisfaction.

It’s great to see that more retailers are paying attention to their search reports and using that information to improve their search. They’re also searchandising more, i.e. using search for merchandising.

Good quality site search is a must have for retailers now. This was reflected in the report in that 96% of ecommerce sites either currently have a search tool or will install one in the next 24 months. I guess that means we will continue to be busy here at SLI.