Is Your Search Engine Paying Off? Monitoring Search Conversion Rates

blog.constructor.io

28 points·danmccorm··6 comments

This was really enlightening and I had never heard of constructor.io before but it seems pretty damn awesome.

Amazing how many people just slap a keyword search interface on their site and call it a day... They'd be better off pointing at Google rather than rolling a crappy home grown solution.

Some friends and I have been throwing around an idea like this, but glad to see someone else is working on it (and doing a better job that I could).

Good post explaining table stakes for reasoning about whether your site search works (and measuring whether changes make it work better).

If anyone is interested in having this but not rolling their own, www.switfype.com (ycombinator 2012) provide a pretty powerful site (and mobile app, etc) search solution, which includes these kinds of analytics and more (disclaimer: the founders were my roommates :-)).

Constructor.io founder here. Swiftype does a great job of being pretty good at a lot of things. Constructor.io focuses on state-of-the-art in autocomplete. Looking at one of the websites Swiftype advertises powering like www.bulbamerica.com, you can see they miss basic misspellings.

Constructor.io, aside from providing typo-tolerance as you type, also optimizes autocomplete rankings to prioritize results most likely to lead to conversions, provides search suggestions as well as product suggestions, and much more.

If you want a pretty good full search solution, use swiftype. If you want to add the best state-of-the-art autocomplete that's proven to increase conversions, get in touch with us at constructor.io :)

I use google to search the site Quora and find that it works much better than the search that they've built for the site.

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