Just about a month ago we released a new version of search to make the marketplace easier to browse, much more dynamic and even more community powered. With all new features, it’s sometimes hard to predict how users will like it and how they’ll use it, so we decided to test the new search out in beta mode. We’re really glad we did that because we got great feedback from the community and were even able to watch people use it which resulted in new ideas.
In summary, most users loved the new search so much that we’ve decided to switch the site over completely. Starting from today, beta search is not so beta anymore.
Based on the feedback, we’ve added a couple of tweaks that we thought would make the experience better:
1. Share It / Favorite It – You can easily share products through IM or email and add products to your Favorites on every search result page. Pretty cool huh?
2. Shortcuts – One day we noticed in our search logs that a lot of people were searching for “Tinkerbell” but we didn’t do a great job of surfacing all our great Disney content. To solve the problem, we came up with the idea of introducing search shortcuts for certain keywords like Tinkerbell, Tweety Bird, and even where is my order?. There’s a bunch more shortcuts on the site. Maybe you can type in random search terms and try to find them all if you’re bored at work!
3. Awards - Did you know that we give out a lot of awards everyday to the best products? For example, there’s Today’s Best which is chosen by our editors every morning. Every day, we award 10 products with the most views that day per product type. We’ve integrated this right into the search results – now you can check out all the past winners by going to the awards tab and clicking on the calendar to view day by day results. Congrats to all the winners!
PS – Keep watching for more updates. Coming up next there is going to be a new easier way to rate your favorite products.
May 19, 2007 at 5:18 am |
Hey – I also noticed that when we publish items and don’t include the product type in our title, it’s automatically added. But, magically, if we do include it in our title, it’s not added. Beautiful.
Is this new, or am I just slow to catch on?
May 21, 2007 at 11:08 am |
Hey Litabug,
Good catch! Well, yes and no. The feature was added about a year but we lost it recently for a bit due to the wrath of the code refactoring gods. No fear though because we just brought it back.
I’m happy you like the feature. The goal was to make it easier for contributors to publish (now you can type one less word… that’s actually significant over the span of one year!) and help search engines crawl our pages.
I should really write a blog post about this so other people know about it… expect one in the near future.
June 1, 2007 at 9:28 am |
I just noticed the new setup for the Comment Wall. Works great. Super idea! Thanks.