Google Mini and site search Internet Marketing for Internet Retail : The Preston Blog

Google Mini and site search

Filed under: marketing |

So recently at Sewell we started noticing that as we added more products our site search became less and less relevant.

This is a big problem: when I end up on a site I typically use the search built into the site to find what I’m looking for. If there search is no good (and most sites have bad search) I usually go somewhere else unless they give me a very compelling reason to shop with them, which nobody seems to do anymore.

I’ve always taken pride in our site search - when we were dealing with a couple of hundred SKU’s it worked great. As anybody who frequents our site knows, we have grown our product line exponentially over the last six months and in the process relevancy has suffered for our shoppers - I was considering software solutions, but finally came across the Google Mini and it made a lot of sense. Here are the reasons:

1) The Google Mini is a hardware and software solution that was easy to implement.
2) The Google Mini only cost $3K - this may sound expensive, but when considering the ease of use and strain it takes off of our existing servers it is actually quite cheap.
3) At Search Engine Strategies they reported that about 33% of purchases online are the result of some type of site search (note: this sounds high to me but even at a fraction of this figure it is compelling to make an investment in site search).
4) Google knows search better than anyone else - it’s a fact.

All in all we have been very happy with the Google Mini so far. Go ahead and do a few searches on Sewell - you want to see all of the USB to Serial products we carry? Want to see all of our HDMI products? Even though these results don’t say anything about Google, it is the Google Mini running these queries behind the scenes.

The Google Mini is programmable with a proprietary XML format - one of our programmers spent a couple of days learning it and was able to seamlessly integrate search into our site. If you would like to use their default search layout you could have the Mini up and running within an hour.

2:13 pm