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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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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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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Searching for brides
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 - [...]
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Amazon Related Searches
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 [...]
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Tuning up site search
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 [...]
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Eurekster gets some cash
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 [...]
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Search Engine Room
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 [...]
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Aberdeen report on site search
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: increased conversion rates increased average order vale increased customer satisfaction. It's great to [...]
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