Posts filed under “Search”
Search Shortcuts in Yahoo Mail
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. alice in wonderland download People send photos around all the time and having one-click access to all photos in your email account is awesome. [...]
Drag a map around and see where the deals are
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 [...]
This time, it's personal
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 [...]
Your best path to strong SEO is for users to care
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 [...]
Couponlooker Improvements – More Coupon Codes and Better Merchant Grouping
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 [...]
User Engagement – Measuring the right things
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. [...]
Couponlooker Improvements
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 [...]
“Most of our work still focuses on the fundamentals”
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 [...]
If you're not searching for web pages, Google Custom Search can't help you
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 [...]
The best long term SEO strategy is customer value but make sure Google can make sense of your site
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 [...]