Category: Business

Farewell to 2020! As exciting as it was game-changing, this year too now draws to an end. Like many of us – we at CXP searchHub.io had to adjust to the extraordinary situation. More than one vacation, to faraway lands, boasting paradisiacal beaches, had to be postponed. We found local alternatives instead. Gardens were tended to, apartments and homes painted, or, simply more time spent with family than usual. So what’s next in 2021?

To be true, this Corona Year has galvanized the vocational day-to-day with the historically private family life more than ever. However, what took some getting used to the beginning of March, has revealed new and exciting possibilities.

Nevertheless, the sun is slowly rising on the horizon.

Notable Achievements in This Corona Year 2020

In addition to revenue growth, customer acquisition, and technology development, it’s also important for an E-Commerce Start-Up to attend to remedial tasks like cleaning out the basement; minding the costs; and time for investing in each other. That goes for both inward and outward relationship building.

This was an impressively, successful year for CXP SearchHub. And I’m quite proud of that. Thanks to our team, our customers, and partners.

My Personal Goal Accomplished in 2020

Every year my long-time friends and I meet and hike for a week. This year, due to the Corona situation, we stayed in our local area and walked from Freiburg to Lake Constance. A wild and fun hike for almost 180 km. And we never once got lost. In fact, the only thing I lost was a few kilos.

180 km hike with my best mates.

SearchHub Software Expansion

We reached our goals alright. Yeah, we clearly surpassed them. As an E-Commerce SaaS (Software as a Service) provider, our most decisive KPI (key performance indicator) is ARR (annual recurring revenue). With growth over 50%, we were able to confirm our business focus set, last year, at the end of 2019. As a result, searchHub.io has played a central role in our business strategy for 2020 and will be expanded upon in the coming year 2021.

Additionally, as part of searchHub, we also launched our searchInsights tool. This is an overview of all relevant Search KPIs with a first of its kind Findability Score (find out more about this KPI and why it’s important for sustainable search optimization in our blog post here) for daily optimizations and reporting.

New Business Expansion

I’m overjoyed about the many customers who chose to place their trust in our business this year. They play a definitive role in the ongoing success of CXP SearchHub.io. Alongside new customers like Cyberport.de, Steg-Electronics.ch, and INTERSPORT.de, our journey continued with ALL our long-standing customers as well. In addition to all the growth, it’s these of which I’m especially proud. Our long-term, trusted customer relationships are the fuel behind the motivation, innovation, and continued development at CXP. Thank you, for the valuable feedback and insightful ideas.

New Customers in Their Words

searchHub.io enables us to develop our own eCommerce search solution based on Elasticsearch with a data-driven approach. The search experience we deliver to our clients is important for us, and searchHub supports us with their unique expertise in this area.

Malte Polzin, CEO – STEG Electronics AG

In CXP, we have not only found a technological vendor, but we also gained a partner who actively participates in our daily on-site search optimizations with an incredible depth of experience. The speed at which we connected to searchHub was a sprint, not a marathon, going from 0 to 100 in nothing flat. A short time later, increased revenue was proof of success.

Carsten Schmitz, Chief Digital Officer – INTERSPORT Deutschland e.G.

With CXP searchHub.io, we can guide our customers even more effectively into our product assortment. The intelligent clustering of long-tail search traffic enables us to control our search solution even better. The maintenance effort for search merchandising campaigns has been reduced, and search analytics are even more transparent. With searchHub, we have been able to increase the value per session ad-hoc by more than 20%

Dominik Brackmann, Managing Director – Ecommerce at POCO.de

What’s in Development

With searchHub.io, we were able to release new features every month. In addition to the myriad technological developments within our Clustering-Algorithm, and new integrations (e.g., for Spryker), we have also added redirects, mapping-statistics, search-insights, as well as, an Online-Chat and On-Boarding Videos, to both improve usability and make ramping up with our software easier.

In 2020 SmartSuggest became part of our standard offering

Jonathan Ross, joined our CXP Team this last summer

Along with the continued development of our OCSS – “Open Commerce Search Stack” – a special highlight has to be our SmartSuggest. This new technology runs on the same SearchHub knowledge base and is available to every customer as part of our standard offering.

CXP Family Business

There isn’t just one highlight this year. In sum, the entire TEAM is the highlight. But I know you won’t let me off that easy, so…

This year presented us, once again, with the opportunity to take our place at the MICES 2020 – in connection with the Berlin BUZZWORDS AND HAYSTACK! Here’s a link to the lecture from our Andreas Wagner on the topic “Diversification of Search”.

This year also heralded the arrival of Jonathan Ross, whom we gladly welcomed to our team. Jon will continue supporting us in 2021 with his experience of many years.

Covid wasn’t gettin’ us down!

Team Event was moved to September

Gabriel Bauer became our youngest shareholder

A new Shareholder was born. Yet another member of our staff became part-owner of the business. A core tenant of our company philosophy is built on the premise of employee ownership. Since 2014, long-standing employees participate in the success of CXP. This year, we were happy to welcome Gabriel Bauer as the newest shareholder. Discovering our knack for canoeing. It’s on our list for next year. Team Event was moved to September.

A further highlight was most definitively our global Team-Meeting. Time to get to know knew colleagues and old friends. COVID-19 wasn’t gettin’ us down!

Due to Corona, we were forced to reschedule to September, and find a Team-Meeting worthy event, while conforming to all necessary restrictions. What began as kind of a downer for the staff, quickly turned into a sunny, and athletic Team-Event, which strengthened our solidarity for one another. It goes without saying, that we will be repeating this type of event the next chance we get.

What’s On the Horizon?

First off, I hope that everyone makes it, healthily and comfortably into the new year, enjoying time together with their families. Once the lockdown is over, we’ll be starting the year 2021 with a few well-known new customers – more about this later on LinkedIn and here on our blog, just as soon as we can officially say more.

Notwithstanding Brexit, or maybe even as a result of, we are taking our first dip across the pond to set foot on the island this coming year. Together with our new UK consultants, UK customers will soon be able to take advantage of searchHub.

In that vein: our partner ecosystem continues to expand. We’re excited to tell you more about stronger relationships with leading E-Commerce agencies, as well as, 3rd Party Systems. With the development of necessary system interfaces, we are building strong synergies.

And… what kind of SaaS company would we be without technological innovations? We are continuing development on things like “Kihon” – a relevant milestone in our Clustering-Algorithmic or “Structured Queries”. Truly, search has never been more simple.

Stay-Tuned – 2021 will be suspenseful.

Sunsets, like these, are beautiful endings

Last but not least – I’m still hoping to see such a sunset in the year to come 🙂

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and see you soon. Stay positive – test negative 🙏

Sincerely, Mathias & Team CXP searchHub

2020 has been an awkward year. Probably you already noticed. Just next to our office there is a great restaurant called Steg7. Marco and his team have hosted many of our business lunch meetings throughout the last years, as well as most of our Christmas events. This year, Marco suffered a dramatic revenue loss, as many other businesses did. At the same time, our customers experienced (at least for their online businesses) significant growth above the rates of previous years. searchHub also grew this year much more than the last. We managed to integrate with a number of leading e-commerce players. Cyberport, JAKO-O, Lampenwelt, INTERSPORT – just to name a few of them.

Steg7 – in Pforzheim – Marco and his team aren’t helped by autoscaling

This discrepancy makes me think. It also gives me a bad conscience. Did Marco do anything wrong? Not at all. His burgers still are world-class, as is his pasta, his vegetarian tables. And his solution: he started a pickup service early in the pandemic, and we love it! So, who did what wrong?

I have the impression that we sometimes look at our world as if it were a Kubernetes cluster (don’t know what this is? Watch this video!, and come back). We love growth. We love scaling. Even more so, we love scaling and growing businesses. Autoscaling – what a beautiful word created by some really clever kubernetes marketing division.

When discussing the growing numbers of Covid-19 infected people I often hear: Our government has totally failed, they should have increased resources for the healthcare system so we would now be able to handle the situation appropriately. While I totally agree that our healthcare system has suffered a lot in terms of “make it cheaper”, “be more efficient”, “treat patients as cases with fixed cost compensation”, I mostly disagree that short-term autoscaling is a solution to the current crisis. Why is that, you ask?

Ain’t No Autoscaling for People.

Maybe you have already read my previous blog post- “Hire or Higher to Go Further”. What happens if you hire a new senior developer capable of doing excellent AI, ML, CI, CD, XY stuff? You’ll probably buy a premium dev laptop with a huge, and fast SSD, a number-crunching CPU along with loads of RAM. Then you’ll buy a height-adjustable desk, a high-quality chair, noise reduction headsets, and maybe even rent some new office space. And after that, you’ll even provide a Nespresso machine (with sustainable capsules from Vitaboni). And not until after the fourth week of ramp-up and first tasks with your new developer do you finally realize that in fact, you hired a totally gifted, but inexperienced junior who somehow made it to convince you during the interview. You can scale hardware easily. But you can’t simply scale those senior developers and spawn a replica. Good news: in the software business, you can simply revert the bugs and bring your stack back to stable.

Imagine the same situation for an ICU department in a hospital. You can buy new ICU beds, new ventilation machines, you can even build new hospitals. But you can’t simply scale the experienced healthcare workers and doctors. So you need to rely on the newbies. But be careful: the ICU doesn’t have anything like a “git revert”, if a totally gifted and dedicated but inexperienced healthcare worker treats an intensive ventilation patient incorrectly. “kubectl scale” does not work in the real world. Healthcare workers are not “replica”. And patients are not pods that will simply respawn after being “deleted”.

It’s Only Autoscaling if You Fully Meet Your SLA

With our SearchHub SLAs, we constantly keep a close eye on the growth of our customers. We love to see those lines pointing to the upper right corner in a traffic chart. And, of course, we prepare well for high-traffic during peak seasons like 2020’s black week. SearchHub even gets better with more traffic – the more data points, the more knowledge, the better the search results. Our hybrid SaaS solution can handle significantly more than 10,000 requests per second. And our background data processing that is generating new AI models auto-scales. Our SLA guarantees that we deliver stable performance and quality of service. Only when this guarantee is met, does autoscaling deserve its name.

Have you ever experienced a classic standalone server running a critical process at 80% load? This will run almost as smoothly as with 20% load and you won’t see a significant impact on request processing and stability. Have you ever experienced the same machine at 101% load? It will hardly manage to answer a single request without a timeout or other kind of failure, most likely it will become totally unstable. The only way to get it up and running again is to: stop the traffic.

Our healthcare system is like a classic server before kubernetes. Like it or not: you can’t autoscale it without lowering your SLA. But lowering the SLA will cause fatal errors.

We MUST stop the traffic.

Let’s do whatever it takes. Wear masks. Avoid contacts. Maybe even celebrate the second most silent night in Christmas history. Use the vaccine. Get the world up and running again. Do it for Marco. Do it for healthcare workers. And do it for the thousands of people that would otherwise die way too early.

Merry Christmas and have a good and healthy (I mean it more than ever this year) new year

Siegfried Schüle CEO

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the speed at which we conduct business. Business at the speed of the atom, you could say. Advancements in computer technology, specifically, artificial intelligence, afford us more momentary physical comfort. It’s always been that way. So, what’s different — now?

Since the dawn of the First Industrial Revolution, we have consistently been using technology to enhance our level of personal comfort, and luxurious lifestyle. Or, if you prefer: get more done in less time.

So far, so good.

What happens, however, whenever our work is providing us with enormous comfort, and grand luxury, albeit dishonestly? What happens when digital software development becomes about lining my pockets, instead of the value I’m bringing to my customers?

Why Should Business Speed Concern Me?

Psychologists see a positive correlation between honest work, and reward for that work (whether monetary, or social), and psychological well-being.

Genuine happiness is impossible without authentic concern for and corresponding behavior towards the well-being of others. Nicole Torka (2019)

It follows, that if I am going to ensure healthy customers, and employees, I need first to design my business accordingly. Business must consider the smallest of atomic structures. As I result, I must take pains to authentically care for the needs of my customers, as well as, my workforce. The operative word here is authentic.

Because, they suffer a disproportionate risk of becoming self-serving, virtual forms of labor, and services are in a dangerous position. With that I mean that we focus on creating software simply to get rich.

What’s the Solution to Atomic Business Speeds?

Honest Digital Development. Simply because something can be made and brought to market to make a buck, doesn’t mean it should be. Try performing the following litmus test before launching your next product or service. Make sure you’re in a private place whenever you do this. Otherwise, there’s great potential for, shameless, disingenuity: i.e., to simply lie your pants off:

The Litmus Test

Ask yourself: “who gets the most out of this?” If the answer is “me” — you will end your business with customers who don’t trust you and a workforce who can’t wait to get away from you.

What Does Honest Digital Business Look Like?

Digital solutions offer a unique opportunity to give an honest answer for how best to close the gap between technology, or the immaterial, and the tangible sides of our lives.

The following are some top-of-mind examples of the kinds of things I’m talking about:

Make it Easier to Purchase Online.

Not ads, or #bullshitmarketing Remember this is about honesty. Information is key to the buying process. It follows that digital solutions will consistently reveal in context information necessary for me to more quickly, and confidently purchase what I’m looking for. How does your solution help with that?

Supplying People with Information

so they can chart new courses never dreamed of before. This field has been exploding for years, and I’m happy about what I see.

And Thousands More Solutions …

These types of solutions may, logically, provide value to all parties involved — a zero-sum-game. Nevertheless, popular culture will tend to err toward the path of least resistance. Presently, this has created a whole generation of stars grabbing microphones, and getting in front of a camera to tell the world about the latest thing which is „sooo cool“.

And they’re right: there are a lot of cool new things out there every day (and I confess: I enjoy watching them too :-)). But who is all those hours of video providing value to? Yep… them (and the publishers and advertisers). It’s a non-zero-sum-game. They get value you get none. Nuff said.

How Do We Stay Honest?

I think all the right pieces are at our fingertips and there are certainly several forays making a difference at the crossroads of the digital to tangible value discussion. However, the ease at which digital content is consumed, the amount of increased free-time we have (machines helping us get things done more efficiently and faster), and the low cost of entry to highly professional equipment creates a greater need for business to take an honest look in the mirror and self-correct.

Be Ready to Let Things Die

We want to leave a world for those who come after us to build upon. To do so, we must make an honest effort to wield the weapon of business to increase the quality of LIFE. Not merely the quality of mine.

This influences the way we work at searchHub and the kind of software and features we ultimately choose to introduce to the market. Daily, we find ourselves at a crossroads, asking: “this is cool but is it really going to help people communicate better with their customers?” If, after much deliberation, and analyses of the numbers, no compelling proof is found that our wonderful new toy will bring any significant return, it’s shelved. Simple.

We move on.

Let it die.

Think for a moment about the myriad things you have been sold, content you have consumed, which ultimately provide zero value. There is a place for this type of content; for amusement and entertainment, to come down after work. I get it. However, this constant infatuation with entertainment, creates a greater need to restore balance within the order of healthy living, and work-life relationships.

Let’s take this a step further: being able to understand and acknowledge our value, as humans, is essential to our success. We must prioritize time in our day to disconnect from all things digital, look at our loved ones, and honestly share our joy in our productivity. For this to be true, my days’ work must be useful, helpful, and valuable not only to those around me, but to myself as well.

All We Have

Real value is coveted and rare. The speed at which modern business develops grants us a kind of superpower to harness, process and analyze information like never before. We can use it to keep people glued to their screens, or to differentiate and pave the way for something more valuable for everyone involved. TIME. Time is best invested in quality relationships, sustainability, patience, perseverance, long-suffering, love. As society, at large, fills time with more and more screen time, we begin to lust after these age-old qualities.

Find a way to package these things into your next product, release, or service. You won’t regret it. We don’t.

Social Equity and Economic Cohesion within Teams

I love my team. Every one of them is exceptionally skilled and motivated. They have created an ingenious product providing immediate value for online experts within minutes. It provides a never seen quality and precision of search phrase matching, using an AI component that can easily be trained and optimized directly by users through a top of the line UI. Of course, we now want to grow and scale. But how do we hire to go higher?

If you have a team of outstandingly responsible and efficient colleagues (and who does not want to have such a team?) there is ONE thing you can really do wrong: start hiring people of average skill level at higher salaries only to sacrifice to the God of Growth. As Joel Spolsky stated long before he launched stackoverflow.com:

“It’s not just a matter of ‘10 times more productive.’ It’s that the ‘average, productive’ developer never hits the high notes that make great software.”

Joel Spolsky – Stack Overflow

Growing Pains – Getting Higher

Don’t get me wrong: I consider growth one of the most important motivations when running a company. But growth is not an end in itself. Growth should increase, your business stability (being larger than your competitors can help a lot), efficiency, (the effect of scale generates more profit), and general profitability. In the end growth should increase the happiness of the team. And if happiness can be achieved better by hiring new people than by raising salaries, we will do that.

Here at searchhub.io we regularly discuss whether we should hire new developers or pay higher salaries as soon as we realize that our profit has increased sustainably. Everyone is involved in this discussion and, naturally, has a profound interest in which direction we should go. Each team member involved in the daily business (development, devops, research, sales) must judge between increased fiscal freedom for the individual vs. less individual workload.

Growth is a Social Responsibility – Hire Wisely

But there is another component as well. We are intimately attached to this industry. When I look around our office during our morning „daily“, I see the faces of my colleagues, some of whom have worked together with me for over 20 years building this industry from the ground up. Because of this team of developers, ecommerce across Europe is more profitable, and makes more educated decisions about optimizations to their customers’ search journeys. It makes me proud to play my part!

So expanding our team of developers, and researchers, Sales and Marketing is not simply about scaling our business. More importantly it’s about maintaining a certain ambition, an ethos, a secret knowledge if you will. My team creates real solutions for real problems that make a user’s or customer’s day more efficient and profitable. This is our secret sauce. This is what allows our team such a close connection to our customers.

Site-Search is not a trivial topic. Few understand it in detail. Even fewer have spent their careers building this space. This is who my team is. And, again, I’m proud of them!

Going Further – Together – to take us Higher

To this end, we aim to move forward together. Expanding our influence in ecommerce search. To go “higher” – creating more financial freedom for each individual at searchHub along the way. To achieve this, each employee we hire has the marked responsibility to take our software and our customers, even higher.

This is the backdrop that provides the framework for how we understand efficient business management and Fair Play salary design.

We at searchHub live to make existing search engines better understand humans and deliver exceptional search experiences. So, why have we now created our own smartSuggest Module, and why does this matter to you? Until a couple of months ago we were mainly focusing on rewriting the user queries into the best possible search engine queries helping our customers to deliver better results for a given user query and gain fantastic uplifts in their key business metrics.

Why Site-Search Should be Considered Part of the User Experience

But soon we realized that we still left much of its potential unused. Why? — because search is a process and not a single feature. Until now, we have thoroughly ignored the part of the whole search process where the user formulates his query. — and guess what — there is already a nice feature for that called “auto-suggest” or “query suggestions” or “auto-complete” in the search universe.

1. The Goal of Serving Query Suggestions – smartSuggest

Disclaimer — in this article we’ll not talk about UI and frontend implementations at all — instead we are going to focus on information-need and information delivery.

We’re already a highly data-driven company. So, we went out and started to analyze our tracking data to find strong evidence that it is worth it to spend a significant amount of development time on either improving an existing or building our own query suggestions-system and to identify the areas we should focus on.

But before we take a closer look at what the data revealed, let’s check if we can find some best-practice articles on the internet and see what they recommend:

The Nielsen Norman Group recommends using query-suggestions to:

• Facilitate accurate and efficient data entry
• Select from a finite list of names or symbols, especially if the item can be selected reliably after typing the first 1–3 characters
• Facilitate novel query reformulations
• Encourage exploratory search (with a degree of complexity and mental effort that is appropriate to the task). Where appropriate, complement search suggestions with recent searches.

 In our summary, this boils down to — guide the user during the search formulation process to facilitate accurate data entry and encourage exploratory search. However, this is very much biased towards the user of a webshop— but what about the goals and needs of a webshop owner? Again, we can find some inspiration on the internet. Lucidworks, for example, points out some opportunities in terms of merchandising when it comes to query suggestions. 

• Customize autocomplete suggestions according to where a visitor is on the site.
• Retailers can use autocomplete search suggestions to draw customers’ attention to certain merchandise. Products that are on sale, that are from certain brands or have a higher margin.
• Use past online behavior to shape search recommendations.
• Tie autocomplete results to customer trends.
• Factor geography into autocomplete recommendations.

 Time for another summary — while guiding the user during the search formulation process, encourage exploratory search, and boost product discovery for users. If we combine the essence of both summaries, we end up with something like:

Guide the user during the search formulation process to facilitate accurate data entry, encourage exploratory search and boost product discovery.

Now that we have a goal, query suggestions work well, if we observe that they help the user articulate better search queries and help to better discover the product offering. It’s rather about accelerating the search process than about guiding the user and lending them a helping hand in constructing their search query and guiding them through the available options.

2. Validating the goal and identifying the most valuable use cases

Now that we know which query suggestions should enable us to offer the user, let’s slice and dice some logs and tracking data to come up with the most valuable use cases we need to enable.

To validate our goals or assumptions, we’ve sampled around 120,000 search sessions across several customers. We further filtered them down to roughly 57,000 search sessions by only looking at sessions that consist of two or more different searches, where at least one of these search types was either a “typed search” or a “suggested search”.

• In this context, a “typed search” is defined as a query formulation process where the user typed each letter, digit, or punctuation that resulted in a search.
• A “suggested search” is defined as a query formulation process where the user typed something and selected a query suggestion that resulted in a search.

From here on, we compared the different search types in terms of their KPIs. The query suggestions have a large positive impact on, probability of add-2-cart and probability of buy and a large negative impact on the probability of spelling mistake and probability of zero-result. Therefore, serving query suggestions shows an improvement in all metrics.

Results:

• Query suggestions are used only if they are relevant and good enough to provide genuine guidance during the query formulation process. This is what we call the intent matching or retrieval process.
• The likelihood of influencing the user’s query formulation process with query suggestions is highly dependent on the session context, resulting in a need for query and ranking flexibility. This is the so-called scoping, filtering, and ranking process.

3. The Task of matching user intent and serving query suggestions

How often have you already cursed your smartphone’s autocorrect?

Any query recommendation should be relevant to the user. If irrelevant information (false promises or unintended suggestions) appears too often, the user’s confidence in the results will diminish, as will engagement. During the intent matching or retrieval process mainly two parts decide if you are able to provide relevant and inspiring query suggestions that can guide users. The first one is the suggestion corpus. And the second one is the matching strategy.

Building the suggestion corpus.

Let us first focus on the suggestion corpus. As with any data-driven application, the fundamental rule (bullshit in — bullshit out) still stands. The quality of the displayed query suggestions will mainly be dependent on building a quality corpus. A smart query suggestion solution needs to provide a robust process of building and updating the suggestion corpus(es).

This corpus may rely on different sources like customer query data logs, product data, or even other data-pools like a knowledge-graph for example. Only by combining these data sources, you can provide the diversity in the suggestions you need. But this combination comes at a cost — redundancy.

• Query suggestions that are semantically similar but contain different spellings should only be displayed once. As there is no value in showing semantically identical phrases with close spellings, for example:
• Singular vs. plural forms of nouns (“women dress” vs. “women dresses”)
• Order of words (“long blue dress” vs. “blue long dress”)
• Compound words (“dishwasher” vs. “dish washer”)
• With and without stop-words (“women dress” vs. “dress for women”)
• Special characters (“swell bottle” vs. “s’well bottle”)
• Alternative spellings (“barbecue” vs. “barbeque”)

To be able to ingest, combine, clean, and update this suggestion corpus in almost real-time is the key challenge for every query suggestion system and by the way, a very challenging engineering task.

The query or user intent matching strategy

The second part is how to match the given user query or user intent against the corpus and respond with a relevant and helpful list of query suggestions. To do so, you need a system that can handle the following cases in an intelligent and graceful way.

• query normalization and spell correction. Since user input tends to be messy, your system needs to provide normalization & spelling correction functionality. When a customer misspells a word or a phrase in the search box, autocomplete identifies the misspelling, fixes it on the fly, and displays the correctly spelled suggestions instead.
• partial and multi-matching. Multi-match is used in product searches to allow matching of different tokens of a phrase on the same product attribute or value.

To handle all these cases, your query suggestion system must provide different types of suggesters. For example, with built-in suggesters you can choose an implementation that allows for fuzzy matches (celvin can return calvin) or another one matching infixes (calvin can return calvinklein for men), but you can’t have both. A nice query suggestion system can do both (celvin can return calvinklein for men)

4. The art of Scoping, filtering and Ranking query Suggestions

Once we have managed to get the matching or retrieval right, and we can receive meaningful and helpful query suggestions, we still have to work on the scoping, ranking, and filtering process to make the query suggestions even more relevant, more diverse, and more inspiring.

1. query suggestion scoping. If we already know that we might be able to help the user to articulate his intent by scoping a broad query (“TV”) with relevant categories or important features, the chances he might find what he is looking for will be increased.
2. query suggestion filtering. There will always be a situation where you might need to exclude or filter specific suggestions based on different data points. Some common examples are.

• false promises — query suggestions, which yield a false promise or zero results, should be excluded from the autocomplete display.
• blacklisted queries — Some phrases may be suppressed via a blacklist.

3. query suggestion ranking. Since we are going to present the user a list of possible choices, ranking becomes a powerful tool to guide and inspire. Again, some common examples.

• ranking query suggestions by business metrics — the most obvious approach is to rank suggested phrases by the number of search events, which works fairly well. But a higher number of search events does not necessarily mean a higher business value. Other relevant metrics could be considered in the ranking, such as the number of sales, margin, etc., which affect its business value. If business metrics are collected over a long period, it can be useful to boost the value of more recent events.
• promote brands or important features — If a user types in a generic subject, say “TV”, a smart query suggestion system will use this opportunity to suggest tv brands, like “Samsung TVs” or tv types, like “curved TVs”, or “4K TVs”, which give users a helpful suggestion, and also applies a merchandiser’s business logic of promoting a brand or specific type of tv.
• promote query suggestions by geographic segmentation — considering the user’s geographic location might improve ranking results. Users coming from different countries might have different interests.
• promote query suggestions based on taxonomy location — taking into account the user’s location in the product taxonomy might help to add additional context to the user query. For example, a user typing in “t-shirt” while in the menswear section. Then the user might be more likely to be interested in shirts for men, rather than shirts for all genders.

Again, a system with maximum flexibility helps to improve the system over time and adapt it to upcoming trends or new ideas and business opportunities. Being able to influence and optimize the ranking of your query suggestions based on behavioral and conditional signals is crucial for your business when it comes to anticipating a customer’s search intent, and provide useful suggestions. These suggestions will help guide the customer through the product discovery experience and remove barriers to finding new products online.

The smartSuggest lib

Since we at searchHub already solve the task of matching user intent, apply semantic deduplication, and provide query sharpening or query relaxation, we tried to find an existing system for serving query suggestions that on top provides the three above-identified use-cases of scoping, filtering and ranking Query Suggestions. Unfortunately, we could not find such a system and went down the path of building it on our own based on Lucene.

With the data provider SPI, any kind of data source can be used to build up the suggestion corpus. The built data is then already tagged for boosting and filtering. It will then be indexed with different indexers, each one optimized for the particular search approach.

For a search request, we search these indexes one after the other, until enough suggestions could be retrieved. This means if there are enough prefix matches, no unnecessary fuzzy matching is done. In a final step, the results are ranked and optionally grouped and truncated. This way the maximum performance with the necessary feature set can be achieved. Everything that’s not necessary will be skipped and won’t affect response time.

The plugin is built as a production-grade workhorse, handling a load of up to 1500 QPS. And for customers using our smart query suggestion, more than 40% of all user sessions already start with a clicked query suggestion, which proves the quality of the suggestions served.

smartSuggest can be a powerful discovery tool when implemented correctly since it offers you a simple, clean API to influence the query suggestions the way you want them by using contextual boosting tags, contextual filters & scopes, blacklists, and business ranking. smartSuggest is simple to integrate, too. You are only two steps away from testing it.

1. Provide your search analytics data API (e.g., GA) or use our Search Collector SDK
2. Start the smartSuggest service in your environment or request a SaaS instance
3. Integrate the smartSuggest API in your Frontend…

The value smarter query suggestions bring

Especially in mobile-first scenarios, where the smaller screen and keyboard limit the use of more traditional faceted search selectors, smart query suggestions do more than merely forecasting words or phrases the user is typing. smartSuggest goes a huge step further, and anticipates the user’s intentions to make helpful suggestions.

These suggestions improve the user’s search experience, increasing both online conversion rates and average online cart value. Overall, smart query suggestions improve both the customer’s experience, as well as helping the retailers merchandisers and the business bottom line. Investing in such features will consistently improve online conversion rates and the size of online shopping carts, especially on mobile devices. Given the high impact from this feature, retailers with a large online catalog are essentially leaving money on the table without such a powerful smart query suggestion solution.

The technology behind searchHub is specifically designed to enhance our customer’s existing search, not replace it. With just two API calls, search|hub integrates as a proxy between your frontend application and your existing search engine(s) injecting its deep knowledge.

If you’re excited about advancing searchHub technology and enabling companies to create meaningful search experiences for the people around us, join us! We are actively hiring for senior Java DEVs and Data Scientists to work on next-generation API technology.

www.searchhub.io proudly built by www.commerce-experts.com

We decided to put search|hub to the test, and the staggering results are in. By using searchHub with one of our customers current search solution, our customer made the following gains:

• 39.6% improvement on total revenue
• 39% improvement on revenue per User
• 25.5% improvement on purchases
• 6.7% improvement on total clicks on search results

Over a period of 14 days, with almost 45,000 unique visitors, search|hubs self-learning query intelligence API helped to increase total revenue by 39.6% and purchases by 25.5% with a 99% confidence score. This impressive achievement is solid evidence that search|hub improves revenue and user engagement for online retailers.

How We Determined searchHub’s superior performance – the Experiment

For our comparison, we performed an A/B test using Optimizely to ensure unbiased results. The traffic allocation was set to 50% for their current onsite search solution and 50% for searchHub with their current search solution.

We instituted a test period of two weeks. During the test period, we were tracking the following goals, with total revenue set to be the primary goal of the test:

1. Total revenue (Primary goal)
2. Revenue per Visitor

Before starting the A/B test, search|hub was trained based on almost half a million searches with clicks and add-to-basket actions, extracted from existing search engine query logs. During the A/B test, search|hub used clicks and add-to-basket actions to continuously learn from user behavior.

Results

The results of the A/B test are staggering:

1. 39.6% improvement on total revenue
2. 39% improvement on revenue per User
3. 25.5% improvement on add to basket
4. 6.7% improvement on total clicks on search results

(searchHub-A/B-Test — customer site search with and without searchHub)

The results clearly show that while having a manually optimized state-of-the-art search engine can be of benefit, having searchHub’s self-learning query intelligence API as a layer on top of it helps to boost user engagement and revenue even more.

What we see here is a great collaboration of humans and machines. People have used their onsite search tools to optimize queries, add synonyms & pre-processors and search-campaigns to the system, which were also optimized by searchHub. Moreover, searchHub automatically cleans, clusters search queries, and optimizes the search results for all queries by applying automatic query rewrites.

IMPROVE YOUR SEARCH TODAY — Try searchHub now

searchHub dramatically improves user engagement and revenue for e-commerce sites. It adds an intelligent layer to your search infrastructure and accounts for business rules, synonyms and extends them to optimize search results across all queries. The results of A/B testing shows good search is important and increases user engagement and revenue for online retailers.

Get in touch to learn how we can help your online business with better search.

www.searchhub.io proudly built by www.commerce-experts.com

searchHub is the Most promising start-up of 2017

searchHub by CXP Commerce Experts GmbH for their work on developing and commercializing a system that infuses human understanding into existing search applications by automatically correcting human input and building context around each query.

On November 29th 2017 — London — we have been awarded for our work on making search smarter. We are thrilled — that’s definitely a really cool prize and even more special — from people who clearly understand the challenges in this field.

Thanks to the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the BCS and the judges Charlie Hull, Rene Kriegler and Ilona Roth.

we had a number of very strong submissions for this category, so I hope you share my view that this makes your award all the more special

Tony Russell-Rose on behalf of the BCS IRSG committee

About the IRSG

Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with enabling people to locate useful information in large, relatively unstructured, computer-accessible archives. In this respect, anyone who has ever used a web search engine will have had some practical experience of IR, as the web represents perhaps the largest and most diverse of all computer-accessible archives.

Much of the technical challenge in IR is in finding ways to represent the information needs of users and to match these with the contents of an archive. In many cases, those information needs will be best met by locating suitable text documents, but in other cases it may require retrieval of other media, such as video, audio, and images.

In addition, IR is also concerned with many of the wider goals of information/ knowledge management, in the sense that finding suitable content may only be part of the solution — we may also need to consider issues associated with visualization of the contents of an archive, navigation to related content, summarization of content, extraction of tacit knowledge from the archive, etc.

The IRSG is a Specialist Group of the BCS. Its aims include supporting communication between researchers and practitioners, promoting the use of IR methods in industry and raising public awareness. There is a newsletter called, The Informer, an annual European Conference, ECIR, and continual organization and sponsorship of conferences, workshops and seminars.

I spent a large portion of my e-commerce search life explaining why searching for “t-shirt” and “tschirts” sometimes yields totally different results in terms of result size, product selection, sorting and visual display. The major part of my job (as may apply for other “Customer Excellence” or “Site Search” consultants out there) was to teach e-commerce professionals how to tweak their search engine to produce exactly the results they wanted.
Things like adding synonyms, defining manual search rewrite rules or even more advanced curated search results. Or (for the real, real professionals) configuring the internal settings of the search engine (fuzziness, field weight, product ranking rules).

How to approach On-Site Search honestly

Usually, all of these efforts resulted in numerous quite well-optimized search result pages that converted nicely. But they entirely ignored Long Tail! Even worse: Only in very rare cases, optimized or curated search results were tested properly to make sure to have the best possible result set. Even if they were tested — things changed within a matter of weeks or days and test results turned old.

The enemy of a good search result may be a new marketing campaign, new viral hype or (in most cases) a simple index update with new products.

I’ve seen many customers who have tried to solve these issues by adding almost endless lists of “synonyms” to outsmart the search engine whilst thoroughly ignoring the definition of a synonym. Synonyms represent terms with the same meaning but different spelling. A good example for a pair of synonyms is notebook and laptop. In this case, you might need to add a synonym because the word similarity is extremely low while the semantic similarity is quite high.

However, introducing synonyms for handling spelling errors, over-/understemming, decomposition problems is something different and represent nothing more than a non-scalable short-term solution to a much bigger problem. As it produces other problems like unmanageable lists of thousands of synonyms, very complex queries with sometimes transitive matches, especially when you have to deal with multi-term synonyms.

Finding a Totally New Approach to Site Search

When we at CXP decided to create a new kind of search appliance, we wanted to avoid inventing yet another search engine. Nor did we want to create even better tweaks for existing search engines.

Instead, we wanted to create something that really helps search engines to finally deliver the best result available for every search request.

The best result is a result that really fits the customer’s need.

But how could a search engine know what a customer wants? Very easy: They are telling us what they want by typing letters in a search box (or by commanding Siri, Cortana, Alexa, … to do so).

Once we know what our customer want, we can automatically deliver the result that performed best for others who wanted the same by infusing the unbeatable combination of data and AI. It is as simple as that.

Now this is Exactly what CXP searchHub does:

• Understanding customer intent.
• Find the search request that best served other customers with the same intent
• Ask the internal search engine to deliver a matching result set
• Observe the customers’ behavior and feed it back into the searchHub Analytics

Facing the same challenges as Site Search Consultant. Give www.searchub.io a try and make your search fly.

www.searchhub.io proudly built by www.commerce-experts.com