The original poster said that he put a second search box at the bottom of his navigation. He found 5% of people used it vs 25% for the one at the top. This is a good idea - it provides easy access to the search for the people that have scanned the page and not found what they were looking for.

The results are timely, given the holiday shopping season is already underway. In fact, more than half of those we polled said they plan to purchase MORE online this year than last year.

In the press release, we list out 5 recommendations for how retailers can make sure they're not left out of the holiday rush online:

1. the items shoppers are looking for should show up on the first page of the site's search results a majority of the time
2. an automated SEO solution that determines what keywords to optimize for and automatically creates the appropriate landing pages is an easy way to drive more traffic
3. “searchandising” (the combination of e-commerce search and online merchandising) gives merchants higher levels of customer satisfaction and return visits
4. an effective approach to site search can be through an affordable, hosted solution that can be deployed in a matter of days (shameless plug for SLI)
5. site search data can be used to see what visitors are looking for, the terms they’re searching with, and what they’re finding and not finding - in order to gain insight into the best ways to promote products and provide a personalized shopping experience

The gift finder is very simple to deploy and is a tool that can generate more sales activity on your ecommerce site. It can easily be promoted on the home page or throughout the whole site, and allows people to define a set of criteria (e.g. price, occasion, recipient, gift type, etc.) and see a list of all the products that match those criteria.

The gift finder isn’t necessarily different from normal navigation – it’s just labeled in a way to be a utility for people doing their holiday (or other type) of gift shopping on your site.

We've found that one of the key criteria for a gift finder is having the ability to specify a price range. Most people know how much they would like to be able to spend on a gift - so the ability to see the products (ordered by popularity or by anything else that is relevant) that are within their budget is very attractive.

You can see an example of this on the Edwin Watts homepage:

This is a perfect time of year to implement a gift finder - and it can be taken down immediately after the holidays if desired.

The new search was nicely presented - with options to refine and reorder the search. However the relevance was terrible. This customer has two sites with different brands but much of the same content - they kept our search on one site. A search for ipod on the site powered by us returned ipods with some of the new Nanos and ipod Touch at the top. A search for ipod on the WebSphere powered search returned no ipods in the first three pages of results - it was all accessories - products that contained the word ipod but weren't actually ipods. From looking at the search results you would assume they don't carry ipods.

The customer now has us powering the search on both their sites. This serves as an important reminder that of all the features you can have in a site search, having relevant results is the most important.

We've put a lot of work into their search and are elated they're seeing such positive results. Their search has multiple SKUs shown in each result, each with their own user rating. The search has separate tabs to search their information pages or to show the results in a grid format. They are collecting user feedback about the quality of the search. We offer various sort options, refinement options and related searches and are showing keyword specific banners. They're also using their site search to help with their SEO and to help improve the conversion rate of their landing pages.

The search engineer who did all this work, Hannah Ashworth had a chance to meet the guys from Cable Organizer at the shop.org show in Las Vegas earlier this month - which she really enjoyed. We find these shows are a great way to get a broader understanding of the whole industry - meeting the other vendors, listening to the presentations and of course meeting current and future customers.

• Visitors using site search are better customers.
  
• Analysts recommend improving the visibility of site search.
  
• One experiment found that by improving site search visibility 2% more visitors used site search and this resulted in a 1% increase in total revenue over a year.

Our customers also see this. For example, In the last 24 hours I have heard of a customer of ours who found that a large portion of their revenue was from customers who used their site search and so they've redesigned their site to make the site search more visible and are tracking the results.

The site search box on your site should be clear, large and above the fold so your visitors can find and use it easily. My preference is to not have any text in the box. See an earlier post: Which box is the search?.

I also recommend stopping by the Exact Target Booth (612). They willbe presenting a case study detailing the integration of their service with both Omniture and our Learning Search technology, to produce personalized email marketing for Ulta Cosmetics.

Some points worth noting:

• Analyzing internal site search terms was one of the most popular keyword research techniques identified for search marketing.
  
• One survey greatly emphasised the importance of site search - over 50% of people who have decided what they are going to do when they visit a retailer site have decided to use the site search. We've seen this data before - about 50% of people are search focused - but it's great to have it reinforced. This is why over 95% of retail sites now have search boxes.
  
• Even though it is universally recognized that site search is extremely important and that people who use site search are more likely to buy, over half the retailers rated their site search as being poor! What's more retailers rated their site search higher than non-retailers - so the non retail sites have even worse site search.

This highlights the opportunity that site search vendors like SLI have - to help these sites improve their search.

The section on site search finishes with a summary of a case study and quotes our customer Shirely Tan, from American Bridal.

I recommend reading the report.

The users were classified into 4 groups based on how their eyes scanned the page. The largest group (57%) was search dominant. This is yet more evidence highlighting the importance of site search.

Further down the article Jakob criticized the site search quoting one user saying "I know where I can probably find it faster: Google". I took a quick look at their site search - here are a couple of comments:

1. The default search only searches their FAQs. This is powered by RightNow, which is a good CRM tool but it doesn't have a very good search. More importantly a good best practice in site search is to make the default search across all of your content. (See Qantas as an example where we search all of their content including the FAQs hosted by RightNow.)
   
2. The RightNow search does have a link to their full site search which ironically enough is powered by Google. It doesn't have the features you'd expect in a site search such as facets, related searches, ordering options and it looks like a web search - complete with URLs being displayed with each search result, which in a site search is next to useless.