SPONSORED SUPPLEMENT: Site search

Online retailers once were content with the search functionality that came with their e-commerce platforms. If it returned results, that was good enough in a time when retailers had many other web site technology investments to make.

Back then, site search technology developers had a hard time convincing e-retailers there was a better way to do business. But now the market has caught up with the vendors and site search is coming into its own as a technology critical to the success of a web site. “Things have changed a lot. There’s a lot more business out there,” says Shaun Ryan, CEO of site search technology developer SLI Systems Inc. “There are a lot more retailers signing on than there were 24 months ago. They have a greater awareness of site search and its increased importance to the success of a web site.”

That increased awareness is true across the board, vendors say. “Site search has become a key priority for almost every size and type of e-retailer,” says Corey Leibow, president and CEO of Mercado Software Inc., developer of site search technology. “Back in January 2005, we were battling with a lot of key initiatives and site search was not a priority. But today, there’s a lot of awareness that site search can be a significant differentiator going into the ’07 holiday season.”

Evolving technology

The reason site search has risen in online retailers’ eyes is they are realizing it is a basic function that consumers expect. “30% of all activity on a web site is search. Search is the way people access information on the web,” says Joe Lichtman, director of product management for site search company FAST Search and Transfer. “It’s what they expect and it’s how they declare their intentions when they come to a retailer’s web site.”

Retailers are paying more attention to site search for another simple reason: Effective site search contributes to higher browser-to-buyer conversion rates. “We continue to see retailers emphasizing conversion rates and looking for ways to enhance the shopping experience to achieve higher rates,” says Larry Harris, vice president and general manager of Progress Software Inc.’s EasyAsk site search unit. “There are many aspects of increasing conversion rates that site search impacts.”

During the years retailers have taken to catch on to the importance of deploying specialized site search technology vs. simply using what comes out of the box with an e-commerce platform, the technology has been evolving. At first, technology developers trumpeted the fact that their site search could make the simple distinction between when a shopper was looking for an iron vs. no-iron slacks.

No sooner was that a form of differentiation among vendors than vendors began developing technology that would allow retailers active control over how the results were displayed. Random or alphabetical lists of results were not good enough. Retailers wanted their highest margin, or best selling, or highest inventory items to show up first. That has become so widespread that the industry has adopted the term “searchandising” to describe the marriage between search and merchandising.

Adding the editorial voice

By now, combined site search and merchandising has become an integral part of the site search experience. “Merchandising tools add editorial voice to search results,” Lichtman says. “It makes the system behave like the best salesperson. If someone in a store is looking for shoes, the salesperson doesn’t just point to the shoe department. He’ll ask what kind of shoes and recommend clothing to go with running shoes. There’s no more effective way to merchandise than with input from shoppers and response. That’s what the best site search does.”

At every step in site search’s evolution, vendors responded with ever more sophisticated technology, until today site search technology is at the heart of successful web sites. “Site search is a core component of how to affect all behavior at a web site,” Leibow says. “If you look at the web eco-system that includes web analytics, rich media, user reviews, all the back-end systems that feed information to the web site, the trigger for understanding all of it is what you learn from site search.”

Indeed, site search has become so crucial to web sites that it is pulling many more web site operations into its orbit. SLI, for instance, offers in addition to site search functionality a navigation function that controls page display, with product attributes shown in a navigation bar even when the user is navigating a site and not searching. On the cosmetics site Ulta.com, for instance, a user clicking on the cosmetics tab gets a nav bar generated by SLI with products sorted by Brand, Sub Brand, Price Range, Application, Product Type and so on. The nav bar looks just like the one she’d get if she had searched on a product.

The key to the success of the nav bar, Ryan says, is the technology has learned from searches which attributes to highlight. “By pairing search and navigation, we provide a consistent look and feel among the pages,” he says. SLI rolled out that feature last October. “We’re still early on with it, but the reaction from retailers has been very positive,” he says.

A single view into other systems

Relating to other systems has become such an important part of the search equation that vendors are providing single-view dashboards or consoles that operate through site search technology but offer views into other systems. Mercado, for one, released a dashboard with its Mercado version 4 that came out in January. It pulls data from other systems such as web analytics and inventory systems and presents it in a single-view format that managers can act on. “It gives merchandisers a tremendous amount of power that they’ve never had before,” Leibow says.

In addition, site search vendors are learning from other areas of the Internet as they develop their own products. FAST, for instance, looks to broader Internet search as it develops applications for users’ web sites. “The searches that people do at your site are tightly tied to the searches they do on the Internet at large,” Lichtman says. “The nomenclature they use to search the web at large may represent how they use your site.” FAST mines that data to help retailers understand how they should be returning results at their own sites.

Search vendors have also recognized that a close relationship exists between how site search results are displayed how Internet search results are displayed. SLI, for instance, displays results in such a way that search engine spiders can crawl the pages and find the data they need to populate consumers’ broader Internet searches. SLI released the Site Champion product at the end of 2005. That allows search results to be indexed so search engines can find the terms. “We’ve designed this with search engines in mind,” Ryan says. “It’s a fantastic way of driving more traffic to the site. Some customers are getting thousands of new referrals as a result.”

Guide to E-Commerce Technology

FAST also is offering a product that allows search engines to crawl a page. Based on search results at the site, FAST technology creates a page for the shopper to view the searched-for product. “And it’s a static page that Google can read,” Lichtman says.

Maintaining the core focus

But while site search has broadened its scope over the past few years, the focus of the core technology must remain on creating an outstanding shopper experience. And site search companies have not let that slip from their view. With most vendors having mastered basic search and navigation techniques, they are working on several developments that make today’s site search different from yesterday’s.

One of those is the ability to search web site content and databases apart from product information. SLI, for one, searches corporate policies, online reviews and other non-product information whenever a shopper launches a search at an SLI-powered site. Its system now can search up to 1 million documents at a site and will soon be able to search up to 10 million.

Another new development is automated normalization of data so terms that consumers enter can be matched to terms that manufacturers and retailers use to describe products. “We have our search solution integrated and compatible with a data transformation solution,” Leibow says. Mercado offers a product data optimizer that cleans up product information and makes it possible for like items to be displayed together in search results. “Most retailers work with multiple manufacturers and each manufacturer has a different way to describe the same thing,” he says. For instance, one bedding manufacturer will describe material as “cotton” while another will call it “CTN.” One will refer to “thread count” and the other to “TC.” “It all starts with the data,” Leibow says.

A further way in which site search has improved on the basics of returning usable results to shoppers is EasyAsk’s ability to do what Harris calls “category specific sorting.” That process allows retailers to set rules based on the category that a product falls into. Previously, all results would be displayed using a single criterion, such as popularity or date that the item was added to the product database. With category-specific sorting, one product—sweaters, say—could be sorted by popularity while another—shoes, perhaps—could be sorted by inventory levels. “It’s a major development,” Harris says. “For the search engine to know which category you’re in is not a trivial issue.”

Black is black

Site search vendors are also focusing on responsiveness and reliability. “Performance really, really, really matters,” says FAST’s Lichtman. “Site search is central to running your site and is a major part of the infrastructure. It should scale to the enterprise.” That’s especially true on e-retailing sites, where traffic is unpredictable. 30% growth in a year doesn’t mean 30% growth every day, Lichtman notes. A sale can drive traffic up by 60% one day and the end of the sale can mean only 10% growth the next. “You need something that can handle that,” he says.

Lichtman notes that FAST started as an Internet search company and continues to build on its expertise in handling searches of vast amounts of data in order to create site search that works. “The types of searches and number of searches that we are used to on the web translated very easily into the e-commerce world,” he says. “FAST is known as a leader in performance. Our customers spend their time thinking about how to drive traffic to their sites, not how to avoid it.”

Vendors are also pushing the technology into new ways of returning search results. EasyAsk, for instance, offers color-synchronized search results. At The Talbots Inc.’s JJill.com, for instance, shoppers who search on “black sweaters” get only black sweaters in their results. Those results are not easy to achieve, Harris says. It first of all requires taking a picture of every product in every color. Next it requires that the search engine recognize colors in search terms. Then it requires the technology to map to a particular image for display. “It’s subtle but very effective things that give you a pleasing response,” Harris says. “You say ‘black’ and Bang! the page is awash in black.”

With all the changes that the site search business has experienced in the past five years, it’s a safe bet that the evolution isn’t over. In fact, site search vendors are already working on the next generation of services.

Personalization

One of those could be using site search to create personalized shopping experiences and even loyalty programs. EasyAsk, for instance, has been working with business-to-business sites and Harris expects that some of the techniques that the company developed for b2b customers will translate into business-to-consumer sites. For instance, search results at a b2b site have to take into account the contract that the business customer has negotiated with the seller, the types of products that the contract covers as well as the types of products that the customer has bought in the past. EasyAsk thus has to search not just product databases but customer history and contract information as well. The results are almost unique to each customer.

Harris sees a day when this experience could translate into creating personalized web pages for individual customers and even be used to create loyalty programs. “Customizing the content is a very important part of loyalty,” he says.

Another big change in the site search market has been retailers’ willingness to accept site search on a hosted basis. Only a few years ago, the main route to implementing a site search system was to buy the software and install it on a retailer’s own servers. That has changed. “We’ve seen an increased willingness to look at software as a service, even among the largest retailers,” Ryan says. “That’s the result of stressed IT departments that are struggling to deliver projects on time.”

Site search technology developers are probably smart to keep innovating as the demand for ever better and more sophisticated site search is certain to continue. Vendors base that expectation on the reality of the online retailing market. “The exponential growth in Internet users is flattening out and retailers will have to fight for every set of eyes that comes to their web sites,” Mercado’s Leibow says. “They’re going to have to differentiate themselves from every other retailer and they do that by improving the shopping experience.”

Site search has clearly become one of the key ways to improve the experience.