How does Google determine if a result is valuable?
Last month I had a chance to talk to Aaron D'Souza from Google at the Search Engine Room conference. Aaron is a Software Engineer in the Search Quality group run by Matt Cutts. I asked Aaron about the new Google webmaster guideline: Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages [...]
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Product Attributes Summit and Internet world.
We are involved in a couple of events over the next week. This involves a little travel for the ever charming Ed Hoffman. He is speaking at the Product Attribute Summit in Orlando on Friday. This is run by Channel Intelligence. Then next week he'll be at the Internet World conference in the UK, where [...]
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Breadcrumb trails
I saw Jacob Nielsen discussing the importance of breadcrumb trails and how they should be implemented. We use the breadcrumb trail in our search and navigation solutions. It reflects the search that was done and any restrictions or facets that the user had selected. In the example below I searched for My Chemical Romance on [...]
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10% of site searches are spelled wrong
We put together some interesting stats from across a handful of our clients on misspellings on internal search. We used a broad definition of a misspelling. If a search phrase contained a word which is not on the site then we count it as a misspelling. Obviously this will also include words that are spelled [...]
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SES New York 07
Just a quick note to say we will be exhibiting at the SES show in New York next week. If you're in town then come by and see us at our booth. This is the first time for quite a few years that I won't be at this show - because of family commitments. However [...]
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Marketing Sherpa says Site Search is the most important page on your site
I was listening to a practical ecommerce podcast yesterday where Mitch Bettis interviewed Anne Holland from MarketingSherpa asking for marketing tips for eCommerce sties. It's a good interview The thing that caught my attention is Anne said that their research showed that the single most important page on your site is the site search page. [...]
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