We’re currently running a mini poll on LinkedIn. When on a site, do you search or navigate more often?  Which do you do first?  Take the poll and see the results here www.tinyurl.com/8wyuvq.

Our friends over at Merchant Advantage posted an interesting summary of the history and the current state of the various Comparison Shopping Engines.

I was reading Jacob Neilsen’s Alertbox article on Interaction Elasticity today. In the newsletter he mentions that shorter navigation paths are usually better. “4 easy clicks are more usable then 5 easy clicks, because the extra click is more work for users”.  This sounds obvious and it got me thinking about how it relates to site search (I pretty much do that for everything I read).

One of the nice things about search is it is a very efficient way of navigating on a site. You click on the search box, you type in your search term and press enter (or click on the search button). Then if the search is relevant the page you are looking for will be above the fold and you can click on it. If the results are not relevant you may need to click on a facet, a sort option, a related search, scroll down, go to the next page of results – or do another search. This is why relevancy is the single most important feature in a search. If the results are relevant it reduces the amount of work you need to do.

The auto complete functionality that we released a few months ago shortens this path further by reducing the number of keystrokes you need to make – by 8 on average. I see Google is testing enhancements to Google Suggest to not only show search terms but also results and ads as you type. Showing search results as you are typing reduces the path even more – you don’t need to see the search results page. For this reason I think  this type of functionality will become more widespread – both in web search and for site search.

Another idea that we are starting to encourage our customers to investigate is to put the focus on their search box on most of the pages on their site – essentially any page that doesn’t have a more important form on it. This again reduces the navigational path – you don’t have to do that first click on the search box before you start typing. You also don’t have to do the work of finding the search box (which on some sites can be surprisingly difficult) – you just start typing after the page is loaded.

You don’t see many sites that put the focus on the search box. Google does it on their homepage. They’ve done a lot of usability testing – so it must be a good idea. Amazon doesn’t do it. They’ve done a lot of usability testing – so it can’t be a good idea. Mmmm. Personally, I really like it. I think Amazon should do it - let’s see if it catches on elsewhere.

Yesterday we released an interview with Alan Lim from Purely Gadgets on the ecommerce podcast. Alan is one of our UK based customers and is our first non US guest on this podcast. Alan is from Singapore, has an office in London and one in Hong Kong (from where he sources a lot of their product directly from the manufacturers). Purely Gadgets sell through out the UK and Europe and are planning to expand further – this podcast has quite an international flavor to it.

Although Alan has many plans for expanding the business he talks about some of the tactics he’s had to employ to ensure his business thrives during the recession. 

Alan uses and recommends Web loyalty and Live Chat.

I was just looking at the data from our search logs and noticed that we served 20% more queries on behalf of our customers on Cyber Monday than we did on Black Friday. To be clear these are search and navigation queries – primarily on ecommerce sites. Black Friday is the biggest retail day for bricks and mortar stores. This data indicates Cyber Monday is significantly bigger for online stores.