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We had an interesting experience recently with one of our customers who uses IBM's WebSphere platform (several of our customer use this). This customer found out that there was an upgrade to the WebSphere search and so they decided to replace the search that SLI was providing with the new WebSphere search.

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.

At SLI we provide search, navigation and automated SEO services. One interesting and topical subset of the site navigation services we provide is the gift finder - a useful tool that gives people an additional way to find products that would make ideal gifts for the different people on their holiday lists.

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.

Yesterday we announced the findings of a customer site search survey we conducted using Zoomerang. We found that more people than we realized - 73% - said they'll leave a site in just a minute or two of not finding the product(s) they seek. 36% said that they would never return to that site and 56% said they would only come back if the site had completely unique items. 96% said that an ecommerce site’s search function is important to the online shopping experience. We knew site search was important but were still surprised at how high this number was.

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

I'd be interested to hear what other retailers have done to improve the search experience of their customers. And if you're ever looking to improve your search we would love to help you.

I spoke to analyst Robin Bloor from Hurwitz and Associates today. Going by his blog post today - At last, a Self-Education Search, Robin agrees with the approach we take with our Learning Search. He describes a recent bad experience of searching on Newegg (which I believe is powered by Endeca) which perfectly captures the importance of having a good site search and highlights the difficulty of implementing site search well, even when you have bought expensive software.

I saw a post by Joe Dolson pointing to a thread at Cre8asuteforums called "When lots of your visitors go straight to site search". The thread contains some speculation about what drives people to search - including poor navigation, and a large site. Another driver we see is some people are just search focused - they look for the search box on a new site when they first visit - it is (or should be) easy to find when scanning a page.

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.