[SoftWareRevue]

The new Google Mini search appliance has been fully integrated into the Hot Scripts site. This addition will make searching MUCH faster and will also provide more relevant results to the user.

What has changed?
When a search is performed, the site will query the search appliance and parse the results appropriately. Any sponsored listings present in the result set will float to the top, but will remain in order based on their relevancy to one another. One important change: all bets are off for sponsors when a user changes the sorting away from "Relevancy". For example: if a user sorts the results by “Member Rating”, sponsors will only appear in the top spots if they are the highest rated listings.

Here are some additional changes that have been made to the search pages:

• Removed the “Advanced Search” link from the site header as this was no different than a regular search.
• Removed the intermediate “Your search is in progress…” page as it is not necessary any more.
• Renamed the default sort type to “Relevancy” on the search results page. This is a more accurate term for the results returned by the Google appliance.
• Removed the sort direction drop down box (e.g. Ascending, Descending, etc.). All sorting types are now sorted in descending order except for “Title”, which is sorted in ascending order. This simplifies the interface a bit.
• Added the ability to filter results by “Free”, “Commercial”, or “All” license types. If you click the “Free” link you will only see listings that have a free license. Similarly, if you click “Commercial” you will only see listings with a commercial license. Clicking “All” will remove the filter and display all listings regardless of license type.
• Searches and the accompanying result sets are stored in the users’ session. This means that the site doesn’t need to go back out to the Google appliance if the user performs the same search again – it can just use the stored results set from the user’s cache. Once the user closes their browser, this cache is emptied.

What to expect?
The search should be much faster and return much more relevant results. As a consequence, it will be up to sponsors to craft their listing titles and descriptions carefully to appear higher in the result sets for desired terms. By using the Google appliance we introduce the idea of “internal SEO”. Basically, sponsors now have the ability to affect their placement in search results by tweaking their listing copy.

[olpa]

Would you please share your experience with integrating the new Google Mini search appliance to the existing site? How much human-time resources required? Did you have show stoppers during integration?

[forgueam]

Olpa,
Thanks for the questions!

Integrating the Google Mini was a rather painless process. The documentation that comes along with the appliance as well as the online community provides plenty of in depth information.

Overall, I would say I spent about 3-4 days getting it fully integrated and running smoothly. Most of that time was spent writing the code to parse the XML that the appliance returns.

Show-stoppers? The biggest hangup is a limitation that only lets you get 100 results of the full result set at a time. For our purposes, I needed to have the entire result set available to me, so this was a big issue. We asked Google about this limitation and they mentioned that a fix is on the drawing board (apparently a lot of other search appliance customers have the same complaint).

Overall, working with the Mini was very enjoyable. The results are really good and tune-able, and they are returned super-fast.

Aaron

[olpa]

Aaron, thanks a lot for sharing experience!

[Triexa]

I've generally found the search function to be just fine, but I certainly welcome any improvement! I love Google's search results so I guess this will only get better!