We released some significant new functionality on couponlooker today. (We also put out some new features on Judy’s Book which I’m really excited about but more on that tomorrow.) Kurt and Dave (Ops and Test) deserve a special thank you for great work in helping us iron out the kinks in this release and making sure the site is up and running.

The biggest user-facing improvements on couponlooker are the inclusion of ‘% off’ filters and related merchant filters to help users navigate search results.

The reason I’m excited about the filters is that they add significantly to user value. If you do a search for ‘digital camera’ on couponlooker, you are presented with a set of results for digital camera coupons (naturally enough) and at the bottom of the page, we present a set of links that allow you to refine your search:

Digital Camera Search

If you click on say the 50% link, you are shown digital camera coupons for 40-50% off.

Digital Camera - Up to 50% off

This is a simple change, but goes a long way to helping users navigate the search results. The merchant filters serve a similar purpose. They also help normalize data across coupon sites so “Dell Home” and “Dell Home, Inc.” aren’t treated as separate sites.

We also released an early version of a sponsored listing system that allows sites to promote specific coupons. These are clearly marked as sponsored listings and clearly distinguishable from the main search results.

Sponsored Listing Example

As before, we continue to de-dupe coupons found on different sites in order to help users find the unique offers out there that are available to them.

Alex has a good post that goes into some detail about how we implemented the above features and it’s well worth a read if you’re interested.

With couponlooker, our goal is to drive traffic to the best coupon sites on the web. We’re also continually adding sites to our index. If you have a favorite coupon site, let me know and we’ll get it into the system.

These aren’t radical changes, but we’ve got to keep getting better at the basics in order to deliver value. There just aren’t any shortcuts.