Amazon turns search engine into marketing tool
Amazon has extended to its full online product catalog a search mechanism designed to reach all of its web pages with content updated every two days. The Index Connect paid-inclusion search system from Inktomi Corp. enables Amazon to use the search engine as a more effective marketing tool, Inktomi says.
“Now Amazon can try promoting free shipping for a week and see how it works,” says Kenneth Norton, director of product marketing for Inktomi. “It can treat its search engine as a global platform for experimenting with what promotional activity works and what doesn’t.”
Until now, Amazon had applied the Index Connect system to only part of its product catalog, but now has extended it to all products on the sites it runs for Target.com and ToysRUs.com as well as the entire Amazon site, Norton says. "It`s a significant increase," he adds.
Search results gathered through Inktomi’s Index Connect appear on Inktomi’s portal partner sites, including MSN.com and HotBot.com.
Unlike a more traditional crawler service, which crawls a web site to index key search words about once a month, the Index Connect service uses an XML-based process that enables a web site to automatically feed new site content into a search index daily, resulting in a refreshed index every 48 hours. This assures that searches for particular products appear with current specifications and timely promotional messages, Norton says.
This type of index system has become more important for Amazon as it has expanded far beyond selling books, because it has become harder for crawler services to gather key search words from its large number of product SKUs, Norton says. “Until Index Connect, it was hard for us as a search engine to get that deep content from partners like Amazon replicated in our database,” he adds, noting that the Index Connect service is only available to web sites that have 1,000 or more web pages.
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