Total Blue System uses a dedicated search "appliance" to provide site search services to shoppers at your e-commerce site. Now we've upgraded this device, part of our pre-Christmas preparations. Here's the first installment of what's new and improved:
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The indexing of your site's pages now excludes non-relevant page content. Specifically, we now exclude the page's header and footer information from the index. This commonly means navigation menus present on every page. As pages are re-indexed, common information on all the pages will no longer be included in the search index for your site and so will not match search queries containing these terms. For example, if you have a widgets category, a customer search for a widget will no longer return all pages that have the widgets category in the side bar. The only pages that will be returned are those that include widget in the content that is unique to the page. This is important to REDUCE the number of search results, delivering a more relevant, targeted set of choices to the shopper.
- Your web catalog, extending to every single page on your website, is now being spidered in what's called default continuous indexing mode.
With the previous device, indexing was a scheduled event a couple times per week that had to be
timed to ensure no negative performance impact on sites. The new device
indexes continuously, at a conservative rate, providing always
up-to-date indexes while imposing no perceptible performance penalty on
your site. Just remember, if you've added a new product to your catalog today, it might not be visible in the search index until tomorrow.
- We have taken the
opportunity of rewriting the search functionality in Ruby on Rails,
providing all the usual attendant benefits: faster performance, greater
stability, improved security and easier future enhancement. It's the last benefit to that list that may most interest our clients: future enhancement. A follow-up post in the coming week will describe what's next.
As background, this appliance is a server sold and supported by Google and incorporates much of the same search technology used on Google.com for web search. We've integrated the appliance tightly with Total Blue System so it appears seamless to your shoppers: they never know the difference. Aside from Google's acclaimed relevance and accuracy, we like the fact that what makes for a highly visible page on google.com will be similar in its results on your own site's search. So if you're wondering why you're seeing a certain search result for a keyword on your own site, the reason is going to be very similar to why you'd see it ranking highly on google.com.
Improving the relevancy of site search results can be a tough problem to measure: how do you know it's better.
E-business Coach's team worked closely with one client who manages over 5,000 web pages on their site. We wanted to measure and refine the results as part of this System Update. Here's feedback from that client, 3 weeks later:
"Yes, we have noticed a great improvement in that searches for "microscopes" or "butterflies," for example, don't pull up 10 pages of results. And searches for some item numbers (like ...) are only pulling up one item now. We're really happy with this result."
Posted by: Patrick Pitman | 25 August 2008 at 06:21 PM