Do You Need Site Search?

The first thing you should ask yourself, is “Do I really need site search?”. If you have a small site, perhaps 50 pages or so, or indeed a site comprised of pages with little textual content you probably don’t have need for site search. There is nothing worse than searching a small site with an internal search engine only to have no results returned for even common terms and phrases. One the other hand if you have several thousand pages or more, a well-implemented site search facility should probably work well.

Requirements and Features

If you’ve decided you want or need site search on your web site, the next step is to put down a list of requirements and features. These will vary depending on the size and scale of your site, as well as what you hope to get out of the functionality. Some of the requirements we have for site search on the individual Inter Sites are:

• Scalable (needs to perform quickly even with tens or hundreds of thousands of pages)
• Customisable layout (needs to fit in with site look and feel)
• Scripting language (php or cgi based)
• Able to replicate across new sites easily
• Ability to index and search multiple sites from one location (our network search)
• Cost effective
• Different match types (broad, exact, phrase, negative etc)
• Category based search (ability to search parts of site as well as whole site)
• Low overheads (in terms of upgrades, processing power, bandwidth requirements etc)
• Ability to implement a revenue stream (paid XML feed integration, selling sponsored listings etc)

Inter Sites Site and Network Search

After testing many different solutions, including the indexed_search solution native to Typo3, we software we ended up choosing was Zoom Search. It offers some excellent functionality, is very scalable (for example our network search currently indexes over 14 million words on 150 thousand pages across the network and returns the most complex queries in well under a second). It also allows us to embed results within a tailored search page to fit in with the look and feel of the site it’s implemented on, and embed paid results in a sponsored box above the internal search results.

Hopefully this has answered some initial site search questions. As always if you have questions please feel free to leave a comment or contact me via the contact page. I will add another post outlining the exact implementation we use at a later date.

As advertising has in the large part shifted away from CPM deals to CPC and CPL/CPA type campaigns so too have the metrics you should be forcussing on. Traffic is no longer order of the day, now Targetted Traffic is far more important even if the overall levels are lower.

This was reinforced for me at the beginning of this month, when I sat down and went through traffic and revenue figures for all the individual Inter Sites for March 2009. One of the smaller sites in the network had the following traffic figures for March 2009:

• Vists – 775
• Pageviews – 1813

Not very impressive by itself, but over the same period this site did the following revenue:

• Affiliate – £110.43
• Paid Search – £15.86
• Adsense – £3.88 (based on a rough £1 to $1.50 conversion)

That’s a £130.17 from 775 visits or approximately 17 pence per visitor to the site. I won’t give you the exact site, but it’s a small niche that pulls in a small amount of organic and type-in traffic.

Now obviously if that was your only site, you wouldn’t be retiring anytime soon, however consider in this case it’s just one of 520 sites in the network currently and the figures start to look more interesting.

Another thing to note is that with such few visits, you’re not chalking up large bandwidth bills, or hardware costs even when you scale up (and more on scaling up in a post soon). Lastly look at the breakdown between affiliate sales, paid search and adsense. As I’ve stated before, if you’re only relying on Adsense and looking at getting lots of traffic to make any significant money, you should look again and see if you have very specific traffic that might convert well into an affilate based sale.

A lot of people running content sites think the only revenue options are Adsense or affiliate programs. Although both can do a great job in monetising content, if you’re looking to truly round out your revenue streams you really should be looking at paid search feeds as well.

An example of a paid search feed is shown in the screen shot here. This is from one of our sites. A user has gone to the site and done a web search for the term “wine rack”. As you can see 10 results have been returned, just like if you’d done a search on Google, Yahoo or MSN.

These results are actually provided via XML from Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) and are paid results backfilled where necessary with organic results.

They work much in the same way as Adsense for Search, however are much more powerful in a number of ways. Some of these are:

• Since they are delivered via XML they can be customised to fit in with the look and feel of your site exactly, as seen in this example.
• You can see up your own additional tracking on the serve URLs to track multiple variables, such as keyword/key phrase searched and clicked on, position on that click, as well as a myriad of bits of information about the user. At it’s simplest this can be done through a free tool such as Google Analytics by tagging the paid URLs as outbound links using javascript.
• As well as searches done via search boxes, you can hardcode links to particular searches on the site with many providers. If you go to www.interwine.co.uk you can see some of these “featured” links on the Top 10 box on the right. These link directly to paid results that are particularly relevant or useful for your visitors.
• You can use a feed to show “Sponsored Results” at the top of your own site search. If you go to InterWine.co.uk and do a site search, you will see a Sponsored Results box above the internal search results.
• Unlike Adsense you can choose to open results in a new window, leaving your site in the background for when they finish with the advertisers site.

I’ll take in details about some of the larger providers such as YSM in future posts as well as information about getting a feed. If you’re a large content provider and you’re only relying on Adsense and/or Adsense for Search for your revenue streams, you may well be missing out on a very valuable source of extra income.