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 […]
I saw an article by John Ferrara discussing how Alan Turing’s ideas apply to search (thanks to Daniel Tunkelang from Endeca for pointing this out on his blog). John observed that people often expect search engines to understand them in the same way that a person would. While search engines aren’t able to do this, one […]
I see Google has finally put the Google Suggest functionality on their home page. I’m a big fan of this feature and use it all the time in their toolbar. We’re recently started offering our equivalent functionality (that we call Auto Complete) to all of our site search customers. This is being well received – […]
Aaron Wall spotted Google showing Related Searches below search results. This is his image. 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. […]
Last week You Tube announced that they will optionally show you search suggestions as you type. I really like this feature – it helps people formulate queries in an intuitive and familiar way. Most browsers have a similar functionality that will show previous queries you have entered – so people don’t have to learn anything […]
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 […]
Google’s new Search within a Search offering seems to be getting a fair amount of attention, but not necessarily for the right reasons The New York Times piece this week: A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites touches on some issues that should be of concern to retailers. A recent blog by Alan Rimm-Kaufman: Google […]
This is an interesting site that allows you to watch what people are finding at a variety of retailers. It’s a cool gimmick but it’s not the sort of thing I could watch for long. It might be useful if you’re looking for a gift – to get some random ideas. It could then be […]