Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

I noticed a small menu called “Search Shortcuts” in Yahoo Mail a couple of days ago. This is a great example of a simple feature addition that has a huge payoff.

People send photos around all the time and having one-click access to all photos in your email account is awesome. If you click on the link, you’re presented with a thumbnail view of the photos in your email which you can sort/slice etc. In addition, in the left nav you get a list of filters that allow you to narrow the list by person, by file type or by time. You can select multiple images and save them all to disk, or you can forward photos with one click.

I think this is absolutely awesome. They could have achieved the same thing with just the ?My Attachments” link, but instead, they thought about the primary use case and made it easily accessible. Features don’t always have to be complicated to deliver a lot of value.

Alex Iskold has a great post on Read/Write Web about Google’s Custom Search Engine and how it shifts the value in vertical search from infrastructure such as crawling and search relevance to UI and site selection.

I completely agree that Google CSE is a net positive for the vertical search space. However, it’s important to keep in mind that it only allows you to focus on finding web pages restricted to a specific slice. Having the crawling and search relevance components freely available is a huge boon to new entrants. That stuff is really hard. However, Google CSE doesn’t help you when you’re search for domain specific items that aren’t web pages e.g. products, flight information, resumes etc.

For example, take Couponlooker, which is focused on helping people find online coupon codes. If you search for “amazon coupon codes” on couponlooker, you’ll get back actual discount codes with expiry dates.

If you do the same search on a Google CSE, you’ll get back pages with coupons on them. A subtle difference to be sure, but it’s extra distance between the user and their goal.

Google’s Custom Search is a pretty incredible product, but you’re limited by the underlying infrastructure and search semantics. This is not a bad thing - the guts of the system are incredible and for web search haven’t been beaten yet. If you’re looking to do something different though, you’ll probably need another approach.

Last week, we rolled out some small tweaks to Couponlooker that should make it even better for finding online coupon codes.

• Fewer sale announcements, more coupon codes:
  We now work harder to make sure that it’s easier to find actual codes that you can use at checkout rather than just links that you have to click on to obtain the discount. Our data suggested that the latter were often just indicators of sales and general savings rather than specific discounts that you could obtain when checking out.
  
  
• Merchant Normalization:
  A lot of coupon sites list merchants under different names e.g. Amazon, Amazon.com, Amazon com, Amazon Coupons, etc. This can lead to clutter in search results and is also detrimental to the user. From the user’s perspective, the 4 variations above should all be returned when they search for Amazon coupons. This is an ongoing process, but we’ve been working on this and results should start to improve.

Improving search results is a gradual process and the Tweak-Measure-Iterate cycle is in full effect.

When you’re evaluating whether or not your site is meeting its user engagement goals, it’s important to look at the right metrics. What’s right for a social network is not right for a search engine. By the way, if you’re not measuring things like visits, page views/visit, time on site, etc you should start immediately. (We use Google Analytics at Judy’s Book.)

In my notes from the Facebook Seattle Garage, I mentioned that the FB team was talking a lot about page views/user, time on site etc. These metrics make a ton of sense for them. Their product is all about user’s spending most of their online time adding to their data on Facebook, acquiring new friends, downloading new apps, etc.

If you take Couponlooker, these metrics don’t make a ton of sense. Our goal with couponlooker is to have users come to the site, find the coupon code they are looking for in 1-2 pages and then leave. If we see page views/user and time on site start to spike, it could mean that users just love searching for coupon codes, or more likely, it means that there’s something wrong with our search relevance. In Couponlooker’s case, we’re looking for 2-3 page views/user (1-2 pages of search results and a click) and we’re looking for a relatively short time on site. Our goal is to satisfy a user’s need quickly and have them return in the future. Naturally, repeat visits and direct traffic (users who typed in or bookmarked your site) are the life blood of any site.

At the end of the day, you’ve got to measure your performance to see how you’re doing and to improve. Just make sure you measure the right things. Figure out the optimal user behavior and the metrics should be easy to figure out.

What is going to make people seek out your website, not just click on a link in search result pages? That’s the key question that you need to focus on. Dave asked me this earlier this week and it’s exactly the right perspective.

In the long run, I think that the best way for a website to maximize its SEO performance is for it to maximize its value to users. This isn’t a reason to ignore SEO best practices; you can’t afford to do that. The bottom line, however, is that if you are a site users care about, search engines will figure out how to send people your way.

Making sure your pages are set up well and that navigation and page titles reflect the content is important, but you need to view SEO traffic as gravy. Now don’t get me wrong - there’s nothing wrong with liking a lot of gravy, but there’s got to be something underneath it. (And yes, I realize that’s a horrendous metaphor.)

With all that being said, Google is an important driver of traffic (duh) and you should make sure that you design a positive experience for users who find you through search. Succeeding at this creates a great virtuous cycle. You get more users, search engines view you as a higher quality site, you show up in more search results, you get even more users…you get the idea.

This sounds awesome. What’s the catch? It’s the whole “design a positive experience” part. No matter how you approach your business, you can’t get away from delivering value to users. Google has to be able to understand your site and index it, but it’s your users’ opinion of your site you need to worry about.

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:

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

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.

There’s an interview on John Battelle’s blog with Udi Manber (formerly at A9, now at Google) that discusses universal search and what’s coming next. Udi’s reply to a question about next steps really made an impression on me.

Q: I’m very interested in the next steps. Without telling us too much (if you would like to, why, please do), what are the interesting problems in search right now that you feel well positioned to address?

A: As search gets better, user expectations rise even higher, and we need to improve at a faster rate. Most of our work still focuses on the fundamentals — making results more relevant, more comprehensive, for more users, in more languages. Much of this work involves pure algorithms, deep understanding of search and of the web, and just plain hard work. Just the way we like it. It is not sexy to the outside world and it doesn’t make headlines, but it has the highest impact. Most of the advances in pure ranking that we’re making aren’t obvious to users — they just find what they’re looking for more often and they take it for granted. Just the way it should be.

There’s no question that you have to continue to improve the foundation on which you’re building. I think this holds true for anything you’re trying to master. You’re never done when it comes to getting better at the basics.

Another powerful idea in here is the notion that as the tool gets better and better, it disappears and users start to take it for granted and focus on the task they are trying to accomplish. It’s something we should all be striving for.

The best way to improve your ranking in Google search results is to give your users something they care about. I’m a big believer in being smart about SEO but anytime you start doing things that don’t benefit users to boost short term search rankings, you’re headed to dangerous territory. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore SEO best practices. Quite the opposite in fact. Making sure search engines can make sense of your site is critical.

Seth Godin has a great post about this on his blog:

It seems to me that in the SEO arms race, shortcuts have a shorter shelf-life than ever before. Building 43 is obsessed with them, and they outnumber whoever you might hire to beat the system. Organic success, on the other hand, is a clear path. If you want to be on the front page of matches for “White Plains Lawyer”, then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Not just boilerplate information you stole from a legal website, but really useful stuff about you, the local courts, the forms people need… the things you’d want to find if you were doing that search.

Once you’ve done everything you can… once you’ve built a web of information and once you’ve given the ability to do this to your best clients and your partners and colleagues, then by all means apply the best SEO thinking in the world to your efforts. Hire the best consultants and use the resources you’ve got left to be sure you’re playing by the right rules.

I think Seth is spot on with one exception. I think you need to be smart about using best practices for search discovery from the outset. Google organic traffic is like gold and having a good knowledge of SEO best practices (or working with someone who does) from the start is incredibly important.

P.S. Seth also points to a NYT article by Saul Hansell that takes a look at Google’s Search Quality group. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it if you’re interested in search.

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:

• Google - Statistical tracking of web and search history to deliver more personalized results. A search for ‘Giants’ in NYC would return a football team whereas in SF it would return a baseball team.

• Yahoo - Social Search based on user reported preferences around tagged sites, friend networks etc. Yahoo’s experience suggested that statistical personalization didn’t create enough variance in the search results, according to Eckhart Walther, VP Products, Web Search.

• Pre-found - Human-indexed web search based on user submitted links. In addition, user submitted profiles which then are used to customize search results.

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