Google Site Search – Affordable website search
A couple weeks back we rolled more changes out on Levolor.com, one in particular included the implementation of Google’s hosted Site Search product: http://www.google.com/sitesearch/.
Considering we had never offered site-based search before and nearly every day we heard from our feedback tool that visitors wanted to be able to search, this was a really straight-forward, quick, and easy implementation that I wish we had done it sooner.
Search can help reveal visitor intent
Google Site Search offers several customization options within their interface. Perhaps the biggest thing we’ve learned thus far is what people are wanting to find on the site based on keyword reports. This offers another slice of valuable data to layer on top of navigation/pathing and conversion analytics to better understand the wants and needs for your visitors.
While search will certainly help search-savvy visitors find the products and content that already exist on your site, perhaps the more interesting piece of data is what they’re searching for that doesn’t exist on your site. This data can assist in providing you the necessary insights on what additional products and features to add to your site.
At a minimum of $100/year, the barrier to entry for site search is extremely low
Google’s pricing methodology is very smart — starting out at just $100/year for indexing up to 5,000 pages and offering 250,000 queries. That is very impressive technology and search sophistication that can be added to virtually any site on a budget. This really lowers the barrier to entry for smart, savvy search tools for websites thereby making it almost completely inexcusable to not have search on your site.
What Google Site Search is not
Google Site Search is not a search merchandising tool like the Fast Search and Omniture Site Searches of the industry. One can only hope that over time Google will integrate new merchandising-related features that make it a viable competitor to give these other industry players good competition. What Google Analytics has done for web analytics I imagine it will do for merchandise-based search optimization as their engineers continue to improve the product features and functionality.
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