Archive for November, 2007

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.

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.

If you have ever run an enterprise web site you have probably received a panicked call from a customer or from your Tier 1 monitoring team that your site was responding slowly or throwing 500 errors and that you needed to resolve this issue ASAP. Maybe...(read more)

Today, we added support for 20 more languages to the web-based Google Talk Gadget. The new languages are: Chinese(Simplified), Chinese(Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English(UK), Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese(Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese.

To access the Google Talk Gadget in your language, go to the Google Talk homepage, select your language in the drop-down menu in the top right, and click on the 'launch Google Talk Gadget' link. Or you can simply add the Google Talk gadget to your iGoogle home page.

As usual, we would love to hear your feedback. Anything we can do to improve the experience for your language? Let us know.

Katya Rogers
Software Engineer

Unbelievably it’s been over 6 months since we’ve blogged on live.com. The lull is not intended, but can be attributed to the fact that the team is diligently working on strategic customer focused products for the next wave of my.live.com.

Microsoft Online Services Division released a few phenomenal products and had a terrific quarter. The Live Search team revolutionized search and released the “new live search” for a whole new online search experience. We heard the feedback from our customers about real-time traffic re-routing and delivered it as part of this release. It also includes many more breath-taking visualizations and enhancements. Also did you know, you can now talk to “Live-search” on your mobile and it will fetch you the results in a jiffy! The live.com team personally urges everyone to checkout this feature on their mobile handsets… Check here for more details of the new live search.

Considering obvious advantages of co-branding arrangements that associates a single product or service with more than one brand name, partners.live.com team worked closely with some of our partners to foster Live.com's flexible architecture to create co-branded portals. In doing so, we provided our partners with:

- Cobranded URL

- Flexible Logo, Jewel, and page structure

- Customized templates and tabs

- Customized Folders, Feeds, gadgets

We’ve launched the following co-branded live.com pages so far:

Qwest   – Launched 07/02/2007 - qwest.live.com

Verizon – Launched 08/01/2007 - verizon.live.com

Lenovo  – Updated 10/31/2007 - lenovo.live.com

The Windows Live Product Suite made its official debut earlier this month, delivering a comprehensive array of new and updated services.  The integration of the products is really cool, giving you the ability to edit pictures in Windows Live Photo Gallery, share them on Windows Live Spaces, e-mail them directly to family and friends in Windows Live Mail, or put them into your blog via Windows Live Writer – all quickly and with just a few clicks. 

The full suite includes:

· Windows Live Mail

· Windows Live Messenger

· Windows Live Photo Gallery

· Windows Live Writer

· Windows Live Toolbar

· Family Safety from Windows Live OneCare

Installation is easy and offers the option of installing the full collection of products, or selecting only the ones you need.  Find out more and download Windows Live at http://www.windowslive.com/default.html

As a team we shall continue the great work on new stuff. We know you all are eager to know the details! Unfortunately it’s not yet ready to be disclosed. But stay tuned to hear back from us sooooon:-)

Unbelievably it’s been over 6 months since we’ve blogged on live.com. The lull is not intended, but can be attributed to the fact that the team is diligently working on strategic customer focused products for the next wave of my.live.com.

Microsoft Online Services Division released a few phenomenal products and had a terrific quarter. The Live Search team revolutionized search and released the “new live search” for a whole new online search experience. We heard the feedback from our customers about real-time traffic re-routing and delivered it as part of this release. It also includes many more breath-taking visualizations and enhancements. Also did you know, you can now talk to “Live-search” on your mobile and it will fetch you the results in a jiffy! The live.com team personally urges everyone to checkout this feature on their mobile handsets… Check here for more details of the new live search.

Considering obvious advantages of co-branding arrangements that associates a single product or service with more than one brand name, partners.live.com team worked closely with some of our partners to foster Live.com's flexible architecture to create co-branded portals. In doing so, we provided our partners with:

- Cobranded URL

- Flexible Logo, Jewel, and page structure

- Customized templates and tabs

- Customized Folders, Feeds, gadgets

We’ve launched the following co-branded live.com pages so far:

Qwest   – Launched 07/02/2007 - qwest.live.com

Verizon – Launched 08/01/2007 - verizon.live.com

Lenovo  – Updated 10/31/2007 - lenovo.live.com

The Windows Live Product Suite made its official debut earlier this month, delivering a comprehensive array of new and updated services.  The integration of the products is really cool, giving you the ability to edit pictures in Windows Live Photo Gallery, share them on Windows Live Spaces, e-mail them directly to family and friends in Windows Live Mail, or put them into your blog via Windows Live Writer – all quickly and with just a few clicks. 

The full suite includes:

· Windows Live Mail

· Windows Live Messenger

· Windows Live Photo Gallery

· Windows Live Writer

· Windows Live Toolbar

· Family Safety from Windows Live OneCare

Installation is easy and offers the option of installing the full collection of products, or selecting only the ones you need.  Find out more and download Windows Live at http://www.windowslive.com/default.html

As a team we shall continue the great work on new stuff. We know you all are eager to know the details! Unfortunately it’s not yet ready to be disclosed. But stay tuned to hear back from us sooooon:-)

Are you a Widget developer? Do different Widget formats have you down? This Widget will end your misery.

Widget Converter will take a Widget which runs in the Yahoo! Widget Engine and convert it into a Widget format of your choosing, be it a folder, a zipped Widget, or the latest flat Widget format. As a bonus, it will clean up your Widget a bit in the conversion process!

Note that this Widget is a developer tool, and it is not written for converting similar accessory applications for other runtime environments to work with the Yahoo! Widget Engine.


Version History
2.6
Addresses bug in Mac conversion engine which caused it to damage Widgets.

2.5
Updated for Widgets 4 with a mini Widget.
Conversion is far more reliable now.

2.0
Updated with a new design and a "can-do" attitude toward flattened Widgets. Hooray!