When a graphic is worth a thousand words in site search results

One of the more novel ways to search for products on Amazon.com, No. 1 in Internet Retailer’s Top 300 Guide to online retailers, is through a search feature that isn’t accessed from the Amazon site. Some 5,000 to 10,000 web users a month now shop Amazon electronics using a visually-oriented search interface that accesses Amazon from the web site of software developers The Hive Group. Amazon isn’t alone in entertaining the concept of alternatives to text-based search. Yahoo e-commerce, eBay and Froogle also are experimenting with various types of advanced search interfaces.

The Hive Group is one developer of underlying technology that supports a visual vs. a text-based search interface. Its so-called “honeycomb” technology searches by product attribute, pulling results from a structured database rather than just looking for words in text. The “visual” refers to how results are organized and displayed to users: in a more graphical format that allows them to narrow the field more quickly than it would take them to read through a text list of results.

While large enterprise companies such as Intel, Sun Microsystems and Procter & Gamble use The Hive Group’s software internally for inventory and product management, the technology has retail application as well. To demonstrate that, The Hive Group signed on as an affiliate with Amazon a year ago.

Visitors to the software developer’s web site can click on a “Shop Amazon” link on the home page, which brings up a menu of categories of consumer electronics products available on Amazon. A click on a category – digital cameras, for instance – then brings up a screen filled with a graphic of small, differently sized and colored boxes laid out side by side. As the user rolls the cursor over a box, a small window with product and pricing information and a product image pops up. That window includes a link to the product page on Amazon, where the user can choose to point, click and buy. A new window pops ups when the cursor rolls over a different box.

The boxes offer no visual images or text data until the cursor moves over them to launch the pop-up window, but they provide visual cues to help the shoppers choose which boxes to roll over. They’re arranged on the screen by group, size and color. Boxes representing digital cameras, for example, are initially grouped on the page by manufacturer, though users also can choose to group them by other criteria such as by customer review ranking. The size of one box relative to another indicates a higher or lower price, while the color of the box indicates a product’s best-seller status relative to other products in the category. Users can choose additional filtering options.

Using an XML feed from Amazon’s product database, www.hivegroup.com downloads updated information on about 34,000 consumer electronics products every night, says Tony Jewitt, CEO. While like any affiliate it collects a commission on sales that do result, “As far as we can tell most people are there to do product research,” he says.

While The Hive Group’s search engine also includes a text search option for those so inclined, Jewitt believes that in the future, a significant number of web users will prefer to use visual search interfaces where offered. He cites a user survey from the web site of Peet’s Coffee and Teas, which has been using honeycomb technology to power its visual search interface for at least two years. The survey found that 50% of all online purchases were through the visual interface.

Moreover, “90% of the people who searched through the visual interface said they found what they were looking for. They felt like they knew what all the choices were before they had to choose,” Jewitt says. “If you are dealing with an 800-item list, you will never feel like you got to look at everything. But with a visual interface you can get a little bit of a view of all 800 things before you actually focus on the areas that are important to you.”