This is a cool feature, although I’ve found that I haven’t been using it since it went live. I’m typically happy with the information that is shown on the SERP. However Google are confident that it improves the experience – saying that people who use it are 5% happier with the results. What they didn’t say is what portion of people use it. I guess they’ll be learning more about it as they roll it out.

Lessons for site search?

As with all search innovations I look to see if there is anything that we might be able to apply to our site search customers. I’ve written before about how site search and web search can learn from each other. In this case many of our site search customers have already been doing something similar. They haven’t been showing a full preview of the page – this wouldn’t make sense on a site search because most of the page is the same – but instead have been doing mouse over popups, which show a larger image and potentially some more information. Note this can be done when you mouse over an image, or can be initiated by clicking on a link.

The nice thing about this feature is it makes it easy to see the product detail of several different products. Without this feature you would need to click on the product, look at the detail, return to the search results page, then click on the next product.

Here are some examples of it in action (with links to the pages):

On BedbathStore a larger image pops up when you mouse is over an image

BikeSomewhere show a larger image, a description and an Add to Cart button

On Efaucets when you mouse over you see a button to click to see a larger image that contains additional info and a Buy Now button.

Lessons for web search?

So is there anything Google and the other search engines can learn from the things we’re doing with our site search customers? One thing they should try is making the preview appear when you simply mouse over a result. They almost do this. You have to click on the magnifying glass image to turn on the previews – then you only need to hover over a result to see the preview. They should experiment with getting rid of that first step. I think that would improve the usability.

Secondly I think they should look at pulling out and highlighting more of the critical information on the web page. To be fair they are already doing some of this. But for example if they know it’s a product page and they have the product information – say from a feed that the retailer has submitted to them then they could show the detail of the product in the preview.

The good news is, while many online retailers may be slow to adopt m-commerce, most recognize the opportunity and plan to address it in the near future. Fifty-six percent (56%) believe a mobile commerce strategy is very important or important to their overall business and 38% say it is important for driving sales. The majority (70%) plan to embark on an m-commerce strategy within the next two years. Only 38% believe m-commerce will be important or somewhat important to this year’s holiday campaigns, while 62% say it will not be important. It will be interesting to see the outcome this holiday season.

According to a recent post from Tim Parry of Chief Marketer, those that have yet to embark on a full-fledged m-commerce strategy may consider launching a mobile site now for research instead of focusing all of their efforts on sales. The thinking behind this is that it might help retailers determine the mobile usage patterns of their customers, so specific needs can be met as m-commerce strategies are expanded.

Other SLI m-commerce survey highlights include:

• Seventy-nine percent (79%) say site search is important to a mobile website strategy and 61% are confident site search capabilities on a mobile site will generate additional conversions.
• The top four features online retailers cite as the most important to enhancing the m-commerce experience are navigation (73%), site search (59%), product pages (54%) and product reviews (40%).
• Of companies looking to build their m-commerce sites, 31% will utilize in-house resources, 28% will outsource the work to a third party developer, 36% will use a combination of both in-house and outsourced resources and the remainder are unsure.
• Fifty-one percent (51%) of e-commerce companies do not consider the iPad to be a mobile device (they say iPad users can utilize their current website); yet 31% will direct iPad to their mobile site.
• Only 22% of e-commerce organizations have developed shopping apps for platforms including iPhone, Android, iPad and BlackBerry, while 49% are planning on creating apps, but don’t currently have one; and 29% are not planning on creating apps at all.

Thanks to all who participated in our survey. The full results will be made available on our site in the next few weeks. It will be interesting over the coming months to see how retailers respond to the growing m-commerce demand. We are already working with a number of you on adopting a successful m-commerce strategy, and look forward to helping others increase sales through the mobile web in the near future.

1. You will see results and ads in the suggestions, along with the keyword suggestions (it looks like only one result and ad at any time)
2. The suggestion feature will be rolled out to the standard search results page – at the moment it is only on Google’s home page & toolbar. (I guessed they would do this in my post about Google Suggest last August)
3. The suggestions shown will incorporate your search history

I haven’t seen the new features live yet – but I wonder what impact this will have on the referrals you see in your web logs. If someone searches from Google’s homepage – and clicks on a result from the Google suggest list – then the referrer will presumably be google.com. This will mean that the referral URL won’t contain the search term. I recently saw google.com in our own web logs but didn’t think anything of it at the time. I wonder if was a referral from Google Suggest?

If someone searches from an existing search page then the referrer will be that page and won’t contain search term they were actually using. That means the referral URL will contain a different keyword – possibly completely irrelevant. For example if I search for Microsoft then type in Apple and choose the Apple.com homepage from Google Suggest then the referral URL in Apple’s web logs would be something like: http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft and analytics software may mistakenly assume that they were ranking for the term microsoft.

There may be similar problems with the reporting for paid search. Presumably the folks at Google have thought of this and have some sort of solution.

Has anyone seen evidence of this happening?  Is there anything Google could do to help us accurately see the search term that was actually used (for example sending people through a redirect that contained the keyword in the URL)?

Goolge will be doing some analysis of the images to work out which are the main colors in each images. For the few test searches I have done this works well.  Google shows the same 12 colors in the drop down even if there are no results. I think it could be improved slightly if they only showed the colors in the drop down for which there were results. Nevertheless, I imagine this will be a popular feature.

I recommend having a similar feature in your site search if you have results where color is important to your visitors. We normally recommend that you don’t use drop downs for the refinements because the drop downs make it slightly more difficult to use (one extra click) and you have to click on them to see what refinements/facets are available. The trade off is the refinements take up more screen real estate. By putting the refinements on the side and using a grid view you can still get plenty of results above the fold.When displaying a color filtering option – you should only show the colors for which there are results (this is the same for other refinement options as well).

Some problems

Color filtering can get a little tricky if you have products that come in several colors – if you don’t have a photo for every color of every product then the results may look a little strange. For example if you have a shirt that comes in blue and green but you only have an image of the blue shirt – then when you filter the results to show those that come in green – the blue shirt will show in the results. This is strange for the user because they’ve asked to see only the green products yet the image shows a blue shirt. It’s a valid result because the shirt does come in green but you need to tell the user somehow.

One solution is to take an image of every product in every color available and show the appropriate product when a color filter is applied. This can be very expensive and time consuming and if you’re custom making the products (for example sofas) then you may not have every combination available to photograph. Another solution is to show the available colors in the search result. Your Blinds do this in the example below. When you mouse over a color a larger image of the color pops up along with it’s name.

Choosing multiple colors

The example below from Jelly Belly shows an implementation that allows you to select more than one color. In this case blue and pink are selected. Jason Marrone, Ecommerce Marketing Manager at Jelly Belly mentioned in the ecommerce podcast that they have many visitors who are choosing candy to match a color theme for a function. These filtering options definitely help those people. I like this implementation – with the ticks in the colors that are selected.

Automatically pulling color from images

We did some experiments a few years ago where we analyzed the product images on a customer’s site and automatically tagged them with the major colors that appeared in the images. This worked reasonably well – but we didn’t have a technique for excluding background colors – which meant it didn’t work perfectly. I’m sure there are techniques for removing background colours – such as ignoring any colors that are on the edge of the image – or something more sophisticated. In any case we haven’t had much demand for this. If you don’t have your products tagged with their colors then let us know if you’d be interested in having a service like this. It will help us work out whether this is something we should be putting some more effort into.

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.

Another approach we take to query formulation is to show related searches on the search result page itself, both at the top and/or bottom of the results and with each search result. These enable people to execute a new query just by clicking on one of the search suggestions.

John went on to talk about how to improve the search assuming the user has done a good enough job of phrasing the query. He quite rightly pointed out that the best result is often not at the top and suggested reviewing your search logs to identify the most popular queries and tuning the results for those queries. I agree that it is important to  review and tweak the results for the most popular terms – but this approach isn’t scalable because search has such a long tail. The approach we take at SLI Systems is to watch which results the users are clicking on and rank those results higher. This lets the users do the tuning and means the search continually gets better without a huge effort on your behalf.

I noticed Google doesn’t have the Suggest functionality on their search results page. I expect it will come eventually.

I really like these – we’ve been generating them for almost a decade. They made their first appearance on the original snap.com (which later became NBCi.com) using our GlobalBrain technology. We now show them on most of our customer’s site searches. Here they are on the Travel Channel:

Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land asks how Google generates these. I’m guessing that they are popular search terms used to find that particular URL. As Barry pointed out, if you search for one of the suggestions, get more links, you’ll see the URL from SEObook ranking top.

This type of related search is reasonably popular on the site searches we host for our customers. Typically we will see about 5-10% of people who search will click on one of these links.

My main complaint is that it is not on by default. You have to click on the advanced link beside the search box and select the option. So very few people will use it. I’ve also see some suggestions that don’t have any results – they need to make sure this doesn’t happen. However these are minor complaints. I’m sure this is a trend we will see more of.

I came across a new search engine today: RedZee. Apart from the cute but slightly annoying logo the main thing that is different about them is the way they present their search results. I am always interested to see new ways of presenting search results – maybe there is something we use to improve the site search experience for our customers. Unfortunately I didn’t find that at RedZee.

The search experience is something like Apple’s coverflow which is used for browsing through albums. Apple’s coverflow has never pushed my buttons – I’ve always seen it as more of a gimmick. I definitely didn’t like the interface for searching – mainly because you have to use your mouse to scroll through the results. You only see the title and description for the result that is currently at the top. This interface would probably work better for an image search.

There are a few other issues – presumably the most relevant result is the one at the top – is the next most relevant one to the left or the right – which way should I go? It looks like they show the homepage of the site, rather than a shot of the actual page you’ll go to. So in this example for a search for cars the Apple homepage shows featuring the MacBook Air, even though the result is for Apple’s trailer for the movie Cars.

To the RedZee people I say nice try – I think you’re one idea closer to a good one.