Archive for January, 2011

All An Autocomplete Can Be and More

Monday, January 31st, 2011
google suggest 300x265 All An Autocomplete Can Be and More

The Google Suggest Autocomplete

Exorbyte continues to see interest from customers in Ecommerce and beyond for its autocomplete capability.  The trend is not surprising as its been endorsed by some of the largest companies online.  For instance Google surprised many analysts when it turned what many saw as a mere widget, its Google Suggest (see pic to the right), into a new core search interface:  Google Instant Search.

I must say we at Exorbyte were not surprised at all.  We have seen first hand that instant search interfaces (also called autocomplete, incremental search, suggest, auto-suggest, search as you type, typeahead, etc.) are capable of changing and enhancing the search process entirely.  They bring a boost of ease of use and finadability to conversions for ecommerce and to just about any other application featuring a search feature.  Our whitepaper on the topic of advanced autocompletes is worth a read if you want to know more.

But just to put this in context here are a few rules to help the business-focused person make sense of the differences.  Ask the following questions:

  • Are the search suggestions returned straight from real live (indexed) content or just popular search query suggestions?
    There is a huge difference here.  Real search suggestions from content can be hard to return every 10 ms after someone types the next character but they are infinitely more valuable to the user because they cut through the search process straight to relevant results.
  • Are the search suggestions returned with a high degree of error-tolerance?  Does it allow for phonetic similarities, aliases and synonyms, complex misspellings (a letter difference or 3 right in the middle or at the start of the word) , multi word queries, can the user erase and re-type, is the system available on search results pages too, etc.
    Error-tolerance, or the ability to find close matching suggestions whatever the source of the error (unknown spelling of someone’s name,  typo, bad spelling in the content itself, is a huge benefit here.  The reason is that autocomplete suggestions happen at the very beginning of the search process as the user has yet no specific idea of what an ideal query for his desired result(s) (disambiguation process).  Therefore error-tolerance is just not a nice-to-have here.  It’s a must have because that’s exactly what the autocomplete is for:  preventing errors that will return too much irrelevant results (noise) or zero results (silence).
  • Does the autocomplete return results in an advanced interface?  Is it configurable to include actual matches from content but also suggested categories, or other facets, images, etc?
    Having a list of items is not enough.  The autocomplete needs to also help the user disambiguate him/herself.  Having a simple list doesn’t help as much as an organized list that also displays associated data (ie. prices of suggested items in an online store).  The addition of images is a big plus but needs to be done only at no cost to the speed of the system (which requires a special image server like that of Exorbyte).

Hopefully, you will find these suggestions useful and you apply them the next time you are choosing a search system or offered a UI with an autocomplete that does or doesn’t meet these criteria.  See Exorbyte’s own autocomplete at work on our Exorbyte Commerce Demo now if you need an illustration and don’t hesitate to leave us comments or questions below.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Exorbyte, Online Travel, Technology, eCommerce | 3 Comments »

Why is Exorbyte Commerce Superior, Part 2

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Hello again!  In my last post, I outlined the nature of e-commerce search in relation to the the  traditional sales process.  I outlined that a very important purpose of online retail search is to compensate for the loss of some of the more “human” elements of the sale process.  Namely, the ability of the a sales person to pick up on verbal and non-verbal queues from a likely buyer and help guide this client or customer to the appropriate product or service.  I illustrated that in order to be effective in this aspect of the sales process,  a website’s search feature must be error-tolerant and user friendly.  I promised that I would outline why Exorbyte Commerce is a step ahead of the competition in the small to medium e-commerce market.  This post will address that promise!

Exorbyte has been in the enterprise search space for more than a decade.  We are one of the elite providers of structured data search.  Our enterprise solutions, like many others in this space, are too cost-prohibitive to appeal to the small and medium e-commerce market.  But many of the features our enterprise solution offers are in dire need in just this space.  We took it upon ourselves to find a solution, and Exorbyte Commerce is what we devised.

Exorbyte Commerce is a SaaS based, e-commerce specific version of our core enterprise product.  The same proprietary algorithms that power our enterprise product, power it.  Because of its SaaS model, we can offer this solution for a couple of thousand dollars a year, well in line with what search generally costs in this space.  As you will see below, the functionality we provide is light years ahead our similarly priced competitors.  Let’s examine this.

I will use one of our latest clients, a flower shop called Fiori Belli, to illustrate my point.  Go to,  http://outlet.fioribelli.com/search/search.aspx, and use the search query, “silver.”  You’ll notice that we auto-complete the query and show about 8 products from the site’s product catalog.  If, by chance, you find your product in the autocomplete, you can go directly to the item’s product page, and buy the item in 3 or 4 clicks (as opposed to 10 or more if you had to browser through search results for it).  More importantly, please experiment with misspellings of the word “silver”.  Because of the proprietary algorithms we’ve devised, it does not matter if you type, “silber”, “xilver”, ”silvar”, “sliver” or any number of other misspellings, we will find the appropriate products and allow the customer to purchase the product in a very quick manner.

Let’s say that you can’t find your product in the autocomplete and have to go to the search page, as I have done here: http://outlet.fioribelli.com/search/search.aspx#q%3Dsilber.  You’ll notice that you can refine your search by facets like “category”, “brand”, or “price” (these facets are customizable, if your catalog is more complex, by the way).  If you click on some of these refinements, you’ll notice that we update the search results on the fly, the page does not have to reload (using AJAX technology).  Again, this is all geared at getting your customers to the item they are looking for, and to the checkout, as fast and as easily as possible.  This maximizes their probability of buying from you and not the competition.

Another issue important to the small to medium e-commerce site owner is ease-of-implementation.  We have found that many owners of these sites are extremely pressed for time, and wear many hats within their organizations.  They may be the tech person, the sales person, the accountant, and the marketing person, et cetera, for their site!  Because of this, a very time consuming integration process is something they just can’t handle.  At Exorbyte Commerce, we’ve addressed this, too!  For example, if you have a Yahoo! Small Business store (formerly Yahoo! Stores), all you have to do to integrate this product is cut and paste about 20 lines of JavaScript in the <head> tag of your site.  It’s literally less than 10 minutes of work, our servers do the rest.  Implementation remains this easy for most of the leading e-commerce platforms on the market today, hosted or not.

Exorbyte Commerce, through its SaaS solution, has found a way to provide enterprise class search for a couple of thousand dollars a year, and has found a way to make the integration process manageable for even the most thinly spread shop owner.  I encourage you to look at the competition in this space, and see if they provide true, error tolerant search, that is as easy to implement as we are!  I think you’ll find that we provide an exceptional, game changing product!

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Posted in Exorbyte | 4 Comments »