There are two great posts at Probargainhunter about comparison shopping engines which have great information about what users experience at the top sites. Highly recommended for anyone interested in this area of online shopping.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but I appreciate a great rant where the author can really make me feel like I was there when things were going south. Here’s a great one on Vista. While reading a section ‘complimenting’ the visual improvements in Vista, I came across this gem:
“Sometimes prettier is shittier.”
Awesome. Robby, I hope you don’t mind my re-using that line at some point in the future.
Nat Torkington has a great post about free APIs. Like, the elusive free lunch, there’s no such thing as a free API. Given Google’s decision to deprecate the Search API and the Alexa/Statsaholic situation, Nat’s post is timely and spot-on.
For these reasons, there’s no such thing as a free API if you’re looking to build a business.
This is a basic truth. Businesses don’t do things out of the goodness of their hearts, they do things that benefit them. There’s nothing wrong with that. It would be irresponsible if that weren’t the case. Any business using someone else’s API to deliver services should make sure there’s a Plan B. You’re entitled to what you pay for…
Last week, we released an update to the site that makes Valpak coupons mappable and searchable. The coolest part of this for me was navigating to the Seattle Restaurants page and dragging the map around and seeing which restaurants had deals in the neighborhood I was browsing. I’ve never paid any attention to the Valpak envelope that shows up in my mailbox but I found myself exploring the categories to see what was available and also to see what deals were available in my neighborhood. I’m excited about this release and for what’s to come in the next few weeks.
Good article in the WSJ this morning (username/pw required) about the growing importance of personalization in search. The approaches discussed:
Some of the pitfalls of personalization that are discussed are obviously privacy but also the negative user experience created by getting it wrong. Another issue not mentioned, but that I think is salient is that of discovery. Personalization can’t just be based on what you have done before.
Software shouldn’t require users to actively report their preferences in order to be smart about personalization. It should be possible to track things like clicks, page views, time on page etc and couple that to the content in question to deliver a more reader-tuned experience. If a user does enter a preference somewhere in the system, you should take advantage of that, but requiring input up front doesn’t make sense to me. We have to deliver value to users before asking them for anything.
Source: Search Engines Seek to Get Inside your Head by Jessica Vascellaro and Kevin Delaney
I came across a cool thread on LinkedIn Answers via Powerset’s Blog. In it, the COO of LinkedIn asked the following question:
“If you could build the perfect search engine, what would it do?”
The answers are pretty interesting and the themes that crop up are around context, intent and some interesting questions are raised about the role of social search and commenting on search results.
There are some ideas here worth exploring in the context of local deals search and coupon search on couponlooker. In both these cases, restricting the domain should make it possible to do a better job of inferring intent and delivering relevant results. Definitely a case of easier said than done, but a problem worth attacking nonetheless.
It’s also clear that spending more time on LinkedIn might not be a bad idea.
On Thursday we released a number of couponlooker search improvements. You can now use quotes around phrases to get an exact match and use the ‘+’ and ‘-’ operators to require or exclude specific terms. In addition, multi-word query performance has been improved as well. Response overall has been very encouraging so far and we’re getting requests for index-inclusion from coupon sites that were not in the initial set.
I love the stress associated with the day of a big release. You’re running around trying to sort out last minute issues, getting bugs ironed out, making sure your data is in the right place and your marketing team is anxiously waiting for the site to be live so they can start their work. It’s hectic, people are crabby, but it’s really fun.
I went through this last week with the release of couponlooker. It felt great to get it out and to take the 15 minutes to appreciate what we had been working on. Even though I knew there were issues and things we had to fix, I think it’s important to take the time to step back and celebrate the accomplishment.
Adver-menus rock! Actually, they are bloody awful. I understand there’s a trend towards turning usability cues into advertising with companies like Google and Amazon joining the fun, but this is ridiculous. The entire fly out menu is covered with a giant ad. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the ‘adver-menu.’
The only logical endpoint to this is a company offering to raise your child for free as long as they can put digital mesh across his eyeballs so they can show him contextual advertising as he goes about his daily life. Given the escalating costs of education, this might not be as far-fetched as it might seem at first. Think about it.
I came across Brad Hill’s post on codes of conduct (and why the Blogger Code is a bad idea.) Although I agree, that’s not why I’m writing. This post is about the following question Brad asked:
Society writes laws that most people already agree about and follow. Burglery is against the law because most people aren’t burglars. Those who are burglars toss aside the law to burgle. (Is there a more amusing verb than “to burgle”?)
The response in the post’s comments:
(yes, to hamburgle)
I was laughing out loud. Awesome.
