The Long Tail: Chris Anderson at eTail
At eTail last week Chris Anderson spoke on the long tail. Chris is the editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of the book The Long Tail. He described how the most popular things are way more popular than the less popular ones and when you chart them you get the power law graph […]
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Why ebay does stupid ads
Have you ever seen bizarre ads from eBay? Often when you're searching you'll see an eBay ad and you wonder why eBay would want to buy the keyword you just typed. Often they can be hilarious. Here is a great collection of funny eBay ads. At eTail last week we found out why eBay does [...]
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Etail 2007
This week we're going to the eTail show in Palm Desert. I'm attending Search Day with one of our customers, David Patterson from Edwin Watts golf. I'm looking forward to spending a day with a group of leading retailers and talking about search. On the Wednesday and Thursday we are exhibiting, please come and visit [...]
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Shop.org First Look
This week we are going to be exhibiting at shop.org First Look in Gaylord Palms resort, Orlando, Florida. If you'd like to meet us in person we would love to see you.
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Related Search on Google and MSN: Good for Users & Search Engine’s Revenue
I noticed that Google are experimenting more with related search and someone had spotted an ad where MSN was touting their related search (sorry, I can't find the link to this). This is good for users and for the search engine's bank balance. It's good for the users because related search is useful and really [...]
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Apple.com search sucks
Apple is one of the most visited ecommerce sites. They have an image of being slick and user friendly. I had high expectations of their website – which they meet for the most part: their product pages show off their products wonderfully and it is easy to shop. However their search is terrible. I was […]
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Great things are afoot
Here's a podcast from Practical Ecommerce with one of our customers Mike Baranov from Footwear Etc. He is talking about the service we are providing for him, specifically our Learning Search and Learning Navigation.
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Cyber Monday
So how big was Cyber Monday? I took a look at the search traffic on a handful of our retail customers' sites and compared their search traffic on Monday November 27 to their average search traffic for the 3 months before Thanksgiving. On average there were 90% more searches on Cyber Monday compared to the [...]
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Alexa vs Search traffic
Lots of people criticize the reliability of the Alexa toolbar - see the comments on Matt Cutts' blog or more recently from Om Malik. I would like to offer some qualified support for the Alexa toolbar - with some data to back it up. At SLI we run the site search for lots of sites [...]
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Was this link useful?
Peter Da Vanzo spotted Google asking users if they found a link useful: Note: It was only shown after he clicked on the result and then returned to the search results page. This is similar to our free feedback tool that asks if the search results page was useful. The main difference is they're asking [...]
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