SpiderBin

Remember my little Search Query Interpreter project that I blogged about? I've got a working model up and running.

I have a couple of bugs to iron out but it's getting much closer to reality. Here's one of my bugs:

The above test query should have been weighted as Brand, Category and Gender.

Here's the code if you have any suggestions for improvements. Interpretation is executed by passing a key phrase to SearchInterpreter.Analyze(string keyPhrase). Analyze will in turn pass back a WeightedResults struct.

There's a great c# article here regarding binary search that I was able to make use of.

The Calendar Control Showdown continues... It's pretty clear that there are 2 levels of UIs in the Calendar Control space that I'm seeing with the Shopping Comparison Engines. Two in particular that I have already looked at are top tier and then the others are clearly not. Functionally, however they do work but they're kinda clunky if you know what I mean?

So here's NexTags' version of the Calendar Control.
 

I'm not a big fan of this style, especially when there are so many Controls on the market that can be integrated. NexTag should upgrade this area of their Merchant Center.

• This approach obviously comes with little risk in terms of browser compatibility.
• Completely entering a date does not offer the ergonomic touch of a Calendar Control.
• The intelligence is all on the server side, this feature will let merchants enter just about any date they can dream up.
• As for mechanics, this is old school html... one day we'll call this retro :)

NexTag should do an extreme makeover on this feature.

This sounds like SingleFeed is getting some multi-threading love... awesome!

Oh man, I think Google must have heard that I was reviewing Calendar Controls or something. I logged into AdWords this morning and I found something that is going to give Become.com a run for their money.

If you haven't seen it yet this is the slick new Calendar Control  in AdWords:

This is really a big upgrade from the previous mechanism which was more ho hum html drop down controlish. This new control has everything I'm looking for.

• Identical behavior in both IE7 and FireFox 2.0.
• The UI is simple and easy though I suspect some users might initially miss that fact that you need to drop your cursor into the Date Control to get the full Calendar.
• Users cannot choose Dates that don't exist.
• The mechanics are very slick but they're not on ball bearings like Becomes'.

Nice job Google!

If you've ever spent anytime wondering how Search works you've no doubt come up with ideas on how to make improvements. I mean, who hasn't right?

I've been putting a some thought into something I call interpreting the query. So what exactly is that? Query Interpretation is the process of understanding what the user is searching for. Huh? Think about this, if you knew what the user wanted how much better do you believe the results would be?

Let me give you an example from the footwear industry. I'm using the footwear industry because I'm trying to make significant improvements to search for someone in this space. 

Say a user searched for New Balance 992. What you have is a request that contains a brand name and a model number right. Ah, when you look at it that way you have an understanding of what the user wants. When you know what the user wants then you can deliver a better user experience. What if someone searched for Womens New Balance Running Shoes? Then you have a request that contains:

• Gender (womens)
• Brand Name (new balance)
• Category (running)
• Category (shoes)

I'll bet you see where I'm going now? This information is naturally weighted. In the last example the weights are and aren't:

• Brand Weight = 1
• Category Weight = 2
• Sku/Model Weight = 0
• Gender Weight = 1

Now I know something about what the user wants and in this case it's weighted more toward categories.

I've built myself a Interpreting Engine to see if I can deliver a better user experience for a search solution. Right now it recognizes over 30 Categories and 35 Brands. I'm hoping to have a beta up and running soon but analyzing models and skus is proving to be a very difficult pattern to understand but I'm getting very close.

Stay tuned!

Need help with your datafeed management? Try SingleFeed.

I've been using their services to manage a couple of my datafeeds and it's made a big difference for me. In one case I'm talking about a very significant amount of growth and to be perfectly honest, initially, I really didn't want to even reveal that fact but that's not fair to the folks at SingleFeed.

SingleFeed owner Brian Smith who if you don't know Brian he's really a nice person who has a razor sharp focus on the SCE space. More importantly though he's always reaching out to help his customers and offering money making tips on how to succeed with shopping comparison engines. I've put many of these tips into action and believe me they've worked.

Oh and think about this, if you're a small business owner and lets face it... many of us are right? The SingleFeed folks can be your ticket to getting heard inside some of these big Shopping Comparison companies. Brian has the highest level of executive contacts with these companies. That's called value!

Go kick the tires and give em a try.

Disclaimer: SingleFeed is currently offering a referral fee. I'm not accepting referral fees for this post.

The Calendar Control Showdown continues on and up today we have The BuyersEdge.

Here's the user interface which I'm not so crazy about. From a user perspective if a merchant doesn't wish to run the default report they're potentially looking at making 7 selections before applying the filter. That's 5 more then you'd be making at Become.com.

To their credit though BuyesEdge is making the most out of this approach in my opinion. Why?

1. Smart selectors that prevents users from entering invalid date ranges.
2. By default the controls set the range for the 1st and current day of the Month.

Overall I'd score it like this though:

• Identical behavior in IE7 and FireFox 2.0
• UI could be simpler to eliminate the amount of selections that could occur.
• Users cannot choose dates that don't exist.
• I'm sorta neutral about the mechanics because they're constructed with standard dropdown controls.