Enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and customer satisfaction are foundational optimization factors both when managing vast product inventories offline or optimizing onsite-search with redirects. Just as a well-organized inventory ensures quick and precise product retrieval, search redirects streamline the user’s journey by guiding them directly to relevant content. This digital parallel highlights the importance of strategic organization and management in both physical and digital spaces to improve overall user experience and business outcomes.
Are librarians the real pioneers of ecommerce site-search?
Do you remember librarians?
The word, librarian, always reminds me of that one Michael Jackson song, “Liberian Girl”. As a kid, I thought he was saying: “librarian girl” 🤦 😁.
I digress …
At the library, Librarians had an almost mythical status. Acting as a shortcut right through the heart of the Dewey Decimal Classification. Of course, if you had the time, there were other options for finding a book. There was the card-catalog, and if you just wanted to meander, there were signs guiding you to different areas of interest. But areas of interest overlap. And the card-catalog required you to know at least a book title or author to get any further. A book about climbing, for example, could just as easily be in either the sports or health categories. Before too long, you could easily find yourself running all over the library on a wild-goose-chase looking for that perfect book.
For the most part, when I went to the library, however, I had a good idea of what I was looking for. I knew the subject, or maybe the author, so I would frequently head straight to the card-catalog. On more than one occasion, though, I would stand in line at the librarian’s desk to tap into the secret power that was The Library Gods. Of course, you’d have to have a bit of luck. There was never a guarantee that the librarian would be at her desk. And, what’s more, she’d have to be willing to help you, and not just direct you to the catalog-cards. So, you’d flash your charming eyes and ask if she could help you find your book. If all went well, she’d look at you over her glasses, stand up, and walk across this tremendous room with vaulted ceilings, to the exact location of your book, pull it out, hand it to you, and then begin providing suggestions for further reading on the topic but in a different part of the library. It was pure, sorcery.
Now, that we’ve evolved away from library use, I’m wondering … where’d the magic go? Remember the last time you navigated to your favorite ecommerce website, using the latest in cutting-edge site search technology, typed in your search term and, like witnessing the all powerful sorcery of a well-versed librarian, you immediately got the result you were looking for
Nah … didn’t happen.
Or at least not consistently.
To top it off, there’s no way to quickly speak with a search engine. It’s like a librarian, who’s not interested in what you’re looking for at all. Imagine getting a response like: “this is your book, babe. Take it or leave it!”.
But, like masochists, we take it on the daily, from site-search engines the world over. Sometimes, you don’t even find anything related that would help guide you in your search process. Instead, you get a list of results that make you question, whether you may have clicked into the wrong shop altogether.
One might be tempted to begrudge ecommerce site-search vendors, or the ecommerce industry as a whole. Especially, when considering the history (from 7th century B.C.) of product catalogization. But alas, product data retrieval has not evolved linearly. Its haphazard, almost accidental improvement over the last 30+ years, has not infrequently been the bane of many an ecommerce manager’s existence.
Only recently, with the advent of Large Language Models, increased computational power, and sinking hardware costs, has product search began to nudge its way back into the sphere of magical sorcery. Even so, for the vast majority of ecommerce shops, it remains a black art to this day. No matter their level of product search mastery.
It behooves us, in light of the above, to briefly pause and pay homage to the dark art of librarian sorcery, and its nexus … the human brain. I mean, Christ, it’s been holding the keys to product discovery, like it ain’t no one’s business, going on 6,000+ years.
And for all ecommerce search’s shortcomings, we must consider the grandness of our task these last decades: to reproduce a neural cataloging structure that mimics the very powers of our favorite librarian. Breaking this code, and laying it free for all humanity to benefit from, is something comparable to supplanting said librarian, and expecting her to perform feats of magic irrespective of the library, the language, or the subject she’s confronted with.
It will simply fail.
So where do we begin?
Mimicking human classification methods
Building on the idea of the library, how do we go about searching specifically enough, to lead customers to their intended product as efficiently as possible, while simultaneously making them aware of related or similar products, with different names, in different categories, but directly related in scope or kind?
This type of product display (or information delivery) is necessary because it mimics the way the human brain catalogs information.
So how do I do it, how do I mimic the ingenuity of human information retrieval?
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the technologies and strategies that have gotten us to where we are.
- Search filters
- Curated landing pages
- Product finders
These tools are helpful and necessary. However, they all assume the customer knows precisely how to find their product. Product finders, are often hidden within category landing pages, or appear after a related search (all spelling mistakes aside). Curated landing pages, again, are triggered only if a certain keyword is entered. Search filters are only then relevant if the customer has managed to land in the general location of their product of interest.
This leads to unnecessary frustration, for the uninitiated first-time-visitor to your shop. And what’s more, the strategies, aren’t increasing search conversions like you think they are. Even for the visitors using them. They simply provide another point of entry for those visitors who already have a good idea of what they want.
This is not a trivial problem, and one for which AI was predestined.
So what’s the alternative to current site-search-journey optimization?
Consider a smarter alternative to the above. Imagine consolidating all keyword variations that verifiably lead to the purchase of the same article. Then, in a feat of sheer brilliance, funnel all traffic generated by this keyword-cluster, to a dynamically populated landing page.
It’s at this point that we return to the above-mentioned search optimization strategies. Because, now, you’ve ensured that a broader audience of highly targeted consumers reach the right page. As a result, your product finder reaches the appropriate people with a relevant product suggestions for an audience in market. What’s more, context-driven search filters are considered helpful by your audience because they match expectations. Expectations that were gathered at the point the keyword was entered into the search box, allowing you to create a CONTEXT, not simply from a single keyword, but a whole cloud of keywords related to the customer’s topic of interest.
So, now, not only do you return spot-on search results, but simultaneously whet the appetite of your customers for more, based on a highly relevant result context.
All of this can’t be cumbersome or overly engineered, requiring scientific rule-sets. And … it has to be possible without changing search vendors because that’s a shit-show of epic proportions. Nah, it’s gotta be an intelligent AI perfectly mimicking the magical associative sorcery of a librarian.
searchHub AI Search Redirects
This is where AI-Search-Redirects comes in.
Like a librarian leading visitors to their precise book, customers are led directly to their product. What’s more, AI allows categorical connections between products. This is like the librarian leading you to different sections of the library, making you aware of related content and media. Whether a book, magazine, video, or that 35mm archiving machine that saved everything onto film.
This is a monumental step forward for site search. The last decades have focussed on lexical similarities. Think fuzzy logic, phonetics, synonyms/antonyms, and the like. AI-Search-Redirects considers all these lexical properties, but now as a piece in the puzzle that is the shopper’s context. We consider things such as categorical proximity, and go as far as evaluating visual likeness between products. This translates to maximum efficiency, while maintaining ultimate flexibility.
Maximum Efficiency, ultimate flexibility
Off-loading bulkier search management tasks to AI increases efficiency. Think about the ability of artificial intelligence to identify contextually related lexical, orthographical, and visual signals to deliver an optimized user-experience for each possible query.
This in no way undermines ultimate flexibility when managing search manually. Integrating AI assistance into your search optimization is not an “either, or” decision. Good use of technology, always presents the best possible mix of all existing options. In this way, AI-Search-Redirects is a “yes, and” addition to your current search optimization workflow. Like an autopilot, guiding a plane or automobile to its destination, there is always the flexibility to take control and edit customer search journeys manually.
Like signs that guide us through a library, a card-catalog, or the librarian at the front desk, AI assistance works in the background so that customers always receive the most optimized product listings, ensuring the highest shop revenues.
How Can I Trust the Accuracy of the Results?
You might be weary of optimizing your site-search by machine. With over 25 years of site-search-optimization experience, we were too. That’s why we backed-in continuous A/B-Query-Testing from the start.
searchHub runs continuous a/b query tests against all query edits, even after they’ve been optimized. No matter if AI, or manual human intervention. Continuous A/B Query Testing ensures the most accurate, optimized search result for the consumer experience in question. If at any point a better performing query variation should emerge, it is flagged and awaits human confirmation.
Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is paramount to search optimization. 15% of customers are using search terms, you’ve never encountered before. It goes without saying that customers who are unhappy with the search results, won’t purchase from you. Because of this, we’ve taken great pains to integrate customer sentiment into our AI. We’ve even gone as far as creating two new KPIs, just to be sure, because we weren’t happy with the way site-search journeys are currently measured.
- Findability
- Sellability
Product findability evaluates how easily products were found after entering a keyword into the search box. Based upon this information, we create either a positive or a negative association between the keyword and the related product result set.
Product Sellability, measures to which degree products are added to the basket for a given keyword cluster. searchHub then records positive (a product was added to the basket), and negative associations (no product was added to the basket) respectively.
As you can imagine, there are myriad ways to combine these two KPIs. Just to give you an idea of the complexity, we evaluate all associated keywords (variations, typos, misspellings, synonyms, etc.), and all products within the result-set viewed by the customer.
In the end, searchHub provides your existing site-search with something no one has ever seen before: clarity. Clarity of customer context. And clarity about what it means to have an optimized customer search journey.
True site-search personalization is a conversation
AI-Search-Redirects, allows you to communicate clearly back to the customer. And why shouldn’t you? The site-search is the only place on your website, where customers condense their intentions into a limited number of keywords, telling you what they want from you. Nowhere else, on your website, do you have the opportunity to be this personalized with your customers.
AI-Search-Redirects leads highly qualified traffic to curated landing pages
The last piece of AI-Search-Redirects, is the redirect. Once the AI has analyzed your shoppers’ purchase behavior, and clustered all variations of keywords leading to purchases of the same product, it’s time to test which keyword within a cluster will be the one to receive all the cluster traffic. Once that’s in place, it’s time to create the store window those customers will see when they land on the result set. It’s no different from what you’ve been doing the last 20 years in ecommerce. Only now, these strategies yield the returns you’ve been looking for:
Product Placement
Which products and categories will appear most prominently.
Signage
Category Banners, offers, partners
Advertisements
Highly qualified search traffic is more easily monetized programmatically.
AI-site-search redirects, are the foundation for highly optimized, high-return, dynamic landing pages for each customer query.
It’s remarkable to think this is all possible without changing your site-search vendor. Maybe we have created the perfect modern librarian: one that functions equally well, no matter the “library” (shop, or search technology). In that case, I take back what I said earlier: I am hopeful about the state of site search. And you should be too! 😀
If you’re not already working with searchHub, reach out to us! We’d love to hear the pains and woes of your journey, designing context-driven customer site-search journeys.
