Web Site Search: More Confusion
May 1, 2009
Diane Sterling, e-Commerce Times, wrote a story that appeared in my newsreader as a MacNewsWorld.com story called “The Wide Open World of Web Site Search”.
. You can find the article here. The write up profiles briefly several search systems; namely:
- SLI systems here. I think of this company as providing a product that makes it easy to display items from a catalog, find indexed items, and buy a product. The company has added a number of features over the years to deliver facets, related searches, and suggestions. In my mind, the product shares some of the features of EasyAsk, Endeca, and Mercado (now owned by Omniture), among others.
- PicoSearch here is a hosted service, and I think of it as a vendor offering indexing in a way that resembles Blossom.com’s service (used on this Beyond Search Web log) or the “old” hosted service provided by Fast Search & Transfer prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. Google offers this type of search as well. Google’s Site Search makes it easy to plop a Google search box on almost any site, but the system does not handle structured content in the manner of SLI Systems, for example.
- LTU Technologies here. I first encountered LTU when it was demonstrating its image processing technology. The company has moved from its government and investigative focus to e-commerce. The company’s core competency, in my view, is image and video processing. The system can identify visual similarity. A customer looking at a red sweater will be given an opportunity to look at other jacket-type products. No human has to figure out the visual similarity.
Now the article is fine but I was baffled by the use of the phrase “Web site search”. The idea I think is to provide the user with a “finding experience” that goes beyond key word searching. On that count, SLI and LTU are good examples for e-commerce (online shopping). PicoSearch is an outlier because it offers a hosted text centric search solution.
Another issue is that the largest provider of site search is our good pal Googzilla. Google does not rate a mention, and I think that is a mistake. Not only does Google make it possible to search structured data but the company offers its Site Search service. More information about Site Search is here.
These types of round up articles, in my opinion, confuse those looking for search solutions. What’s the fix? I think the write up should have made the focus on e-commerce in the title of the article and probably early in the write up included the words “e-commerce search”. Second, I think the companies profiled should have been ones who deliver e-commerce search functions. None of the profiled companies have a big footprint in the site search world that I track. This does not mean that the companies don’t have beefy revenue or satisfied customers. I think that the selection is off by 15 degrees and a bit of a fruit salad, not a plate of carrots.
Why do I care?
There is considerable confusion about search. There are significant differences between a search system for a text centric site and a search system for a structured information site such as an e-commerce site. One could argue that Endeca is a leader in e-commerce. That’s fine but most people don’t know this side of Endeca. The omission is confusing. The result, in my experience, is that the reader is confused. The procurement team is confused. And competitors are confused. Search is tough enough without having the worlds of image, text, and structured data scrambled unnecessarily.
Stephen Arnold, May 1, 2009
Comments
2 Responses to “Web Site Search: More Confusion”
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I agree: it’s odd to have an article about search for ecommerce that doesn’t mention Endeca (which I’ll certainly argue is the leader–even if I’m partial), or our even our main competitors in that market. But cut the writer some slack: she’s “a freelance writer specializing in business communications”, not a specialist on search technology.
Obviously, they should have called one of us!
I should take another look at Picosearch, for a long time it was fallow, and Teragram refused to talk about it. Maybe they’re reviving it?