Traffick: December 07, 2003: Search Engine Enlightenment

Sometimes it's Better Just to Google?

Searching for "rosetta stone mousepad," I had trouble finding such an item at Shopping.com. Sure enough, typing the same query into Google yields some exactly perfect organic results pages, including this one from the British Museum.

The fact that you don't always find what you're looking for may not creep into the aggregate stats we hear for e-commerce every holiday season. The same problem exists with site search on so many e-commerce sites once you arrive there... the hard-to-find item never gets found because the site search is wonky.

The responsibility for making things easier to find doesn't like primarily with the searcher, methinks. It's a joint effort between the shopping bots and the retailers themselves. It's probably just a matter of months before a great deal more retailers join with the Shopping.com's and Froogles of this world to do a better job of getting their "whole" catalog with full descriptions properly indexed.

Let's face it, if a product exists "out there," a shopping engine should be able to find it. Pricegrabber and Shopping.com didn't find this one for me.

And upon double checking the same query at Froogle gives you at least a couple of relevant stores selling this product, along with a photo of it. Click, buy, done!

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Blizzard Sparks Online Shopping

Shopping.com made an interesting announcement today: the company said it saw a “dramatic rise” in traffic from the northeastern United States during last weekend’s blizzard. The announcement said the following Monday broke all previous one-day records for traffic, lead referral and revenue, attracting more two million shoppers, which equates to 35 shoppers per second. The company also said demand for snow throwers skyrocketed.

All in all, the company said it has served a record number of holiday shoppers since the “official start” of the holiday shopping season following the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday on November 28th. Among the items in hot demand this holiday season are MP3 players, engagement rings, New Balance athletic products and electric guitars – all of which aren’t exactly priced at the CD or book level. Could consumers finally be getting the hang of this “e-commerce” thing?

Sunday, December 07, 2003

New Traffick Article:
Just Say No to Google Algorithm Chasing
By Jill Whalen - 12/8/2003

I don't chase algorithms, and neither should you. I know, I know, you all want to get the best rankings possible and have an advantage over your competitors, the easiest and cheapest way possible, but look what that did for you -- now your site is missing and your traffic is gone.

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