Google Site Search Upgrade

[Biffy]

I hope ya'll saw this in today's news. I decided to check it out while having coffee this morning.

With today's upgrades this is now the highest quality, most feature rich onsite search engine available. It allows you to add a dictionary of synonyms, you can bias your results by freshness and bias your results by popularity. And you control the strength of the biasing. It has numerous other quite useful features, too. None of which are available in any Miva search module.

So if Google Site Search is so wonderful would I recommend it?

No, I wouldn't.

It is a hosted solution. I may be old-timey about this but I plain do not like hosted solutions to anything. Historically, hosted solutions are your weakest link and cause your biggest headaches in an ecommerce system. Shoot, Analytics makes me nervous because the beta tests caused checkout to freeze up and customers to bailout. If Site Search breaks does it break your store? I don't know the answer but it's a critical question.

Google Site Search is expensive. The $100 per year package will serve the smallest Miva businesses but that's too much money for the small timers to spend. Many of my clients fall into the $500+ per year category. That's a heck of a lot to pay for site seach and my customers are probably too tight with their money to do it. They get a lot better bang for the buck by creating Miva custom keyword fields and using an advanced search Module.

Google Site Search looks like a truly wonderful search product but in my opinion it has the two major roadblocks I've mentioned to being widely adopted by my customers.

Google Site Search

Google is running a contest to give away a free Google Site Search. If you want to try your luck follow this link:

Google Site Search Contest

[JFancett]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

I couldn't disagree more.

[d_host]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

Biffy.... these comments coming from the same person who just said you'd use Google Analytics over Urchin, even if both were free? :-) Yes, one of the huge downfalls of GA is that if their servers don't respond, or don't respond fast enough, YOUR e-commerce site may not load completely or you may not get any stats collected at all. That's where Urchin shines - it doesn't care if the site is up, down or sideways - it processes web server logs at its convenience. Google Analytics can't touch that, hence the ~20% lower numbers you will see for your traffic on GA vs Urchin, Webalizer, AWstats or other similar packages that look at your actual log files, not just JavaScript hits to a remote server.

So, if you dislike hosted solutions in general, why would you even consider Google Analytics in the first place? Wouldn't you call that a double standard....? :-)

(all comments are a bit tongue in cheek - don't take them too seriously!)

[JFancett]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

I just don't know how a consultant that eschews cheaper hosted solutions has clients that can't afford $100 a year for search.

[Biffy]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

$100 per year in Site Search doesn't get you enough. It doesn't get you near enough if your customers are doing much search. If customers are not doing much search then why bother? It just doesn't make economic sense. I'd love to have the functionality. I'd love to get a sufficient volume for the price. Until that day comes...Miva search customization is cheaper, unlimited, and more reliable.

I hold Volusion up as a prime example of hosted solutions. If you like spending twice the money for triple the cart bailouts, go for it. Just don't call me to fix it.

Analytics would freeze Miva up when it first came out. I recommended against it and uninstalled it on the few early adopters I had. It doesn't do that anymore. You may miss stats but it won't kill your store or block orders so I now recommend it as a free solution.

Why would anyone want to spend $4000 for Urchin and forfeit AdWords analysis, ROI, and Goals? The problem here is you're giving up too much valuable functionality for too much money. The gain in performance and privacy isn't worth it to most folks, not even close. Show me an Urchin that's worth the money and I'll go for it. As long as it's nothing but an Analytics Lite I can't recommend it other than for privacy reasons. It's horribly overpriced and lacks critical stats needed to run an ecommerce system. I'd love to have a "local" Analytics with a reasonable price, but I don't see one from where I sit.

The real decision is what makes the most money. Period. Analytics makes money, sometimes terrific money, but I don't see Urchin doing that as well because of the missing stats (ROI and cart bailout are critical) and the fact that you have to start in a $4000 hole and then try to dig yourself out.

Jim, I'm just a country doctor.

Bones

[d_host]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

Steve,

Time to get that pricelists updated... ;-) Urchin v5 is $895 (full retail), Miva Merchant e-commerce add-on is $695. There were couple add-ons to it that would push it into the $4K+ category, but... few people ever used them. The new Urchin v6 will be a flat fee $2995 and will include most of what you describe as well as some new options not available in Google Analytics, plus all the add-ons previously available for v5.x as options.

Keep in mind though that this price is for 100 profiles, or domains, so in MOST cases you wouldn't be buying it for your own one domain - it would be provided by your host for something very inexpensive like $10/month perhaps. That's a far cry from "$4000" and is totally affordable by virtually any business, even a tiny startup.

In the grand schema of things, Urchin is actually very cheap. If you look at their closest competitors from WebTrends or ClickTraks, they charge quite a bit more - a small site will cost about $150/month in fees, and most good stuff is available on a metered basis, ie: pricing is based on the number of visits or hits on your web site.

Anyway, this thread really got a bit off-track... Both GA and Urchin have their purposes in life and ultimately any decent site would use both systems, if they have a need for web analytics and managing AdWords. It may be a bad analogy, but since you mentioned Photoshop previously... it's like having both Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator on your computer. They both do "graphics", but they do it in a very different ways and have very different sets of tools, and most any graphic designer will use the two together to accomplish their design objectives. At the end of the day you have a finished product that is presentable and easy to digest, but if you tried to accomplish it all in just one application you'd be missing a lot of valuable stuff, and the info you did have would take you 3 times longer to put together and still not paint the whole picture (pun intended).

[Biffy]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

Urchin 6 at $10/month would be a good deal.

I've looked at the Urchin 6 site but it looks exactly like the previous version of Analytics with the old-style calendars. The list of features is virtually identical, too, with some extra system stuff in Urchin.

Let me ask you this - do you have a client who'd be willing to add me as a user to their Urchin 6 reports for a couple of days and let me check it out?

[d_host]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

Hmmm, I don't think many clients would like to give a 3rd party access to their web stats like this, and for what it's worth - Urchin 6 is still in beta so we have only a handful of clients testing it. BUT, I'll offer you another suggestion... Your host offers Urchin (v5), why not ask them to see if they can install the beta on their servers and give you access so you can get first-hand experience - completely free for the first 30 days?

[Pete McNamara]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

Why would anyone .... forfeit AdWords analysis, ROI, and Goals?

i.e. why would any store owner not use Google Analytics? Here are a couple of reasons:

1. Because the store doesn't spend much, if anything on Adwords
2. Because Google uses your highly confidential sales information to help your competitors

Giving your confidential sales information to them, is like bending over in Castro Street.

I wonder how many store owners have ever thought why Google provides this service free? It is not because they think store owners:

1. are great people
2. deserve something for nothing

Instead, they are seeing precisely what you are selling, your prices, your order values, from not only those sales generated from Adwords, but sales from all your sources.

They are using this information to work out how they can generate more Adwords revenue from you (i.e nail you harder) and also to assist your competitors (by getting them to spend more and more effectively, on Adwords). When your friendly Adwords representative makes suggestions to you on how to most effectively advertise on Adwords, from where is Google deriving the information? From Google Analytics. You are giving them all the information they need for them to maximize their revenue from you and your competitors.

Note that I am not criticising Google for this - this is exactly what I would do under the same circumstances.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

[d_host]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

Pete - very well said. I didn't go into that aspect of Google Analytics, but you explained very well what's happening with "your" web site stats and info and how Google can "make you" spend more money with the information you are feeding them, voluntarily.

There is no such thing as free lunch. You said it, and I'll say it again. There's always a catch when you see the word "FREE!!!"...

[Biffy]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

Site Search isn't free and I'll bet anything Google is still data mining you.

I tell all my clients data mining is the cost of Analytics.

Often there's a catch even when you pay through the nose.

Also, there's no such thing as privacy on the web.

[Pete McNamara]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

Well that's just nonsense Steve. There is a world of difference between Google "mining" Google search and Adwords traffic (i.e. knowing what Google organic searches and what Adwords advs are sending you traffic) and it knowing not only that but full details of your traffic from all sources plus, and this is by far the worst part, precisely how much money you are making from each and every organic search and each and every PPC advertisement.

[Biffy]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

If you think my statement that Google is data mining is nonesense then there's not much I can do to help you, Pete.

[Pete McNamara]

Re: Google Site Search Upgrade

Steve, I need help. I need you (or anyone else for that matter) to explain to me how Google is data mining my clients sales infomation which is only available in Miva Admin, their accounting systems in their computers in their offices, their secured payment gateways and confidential PPC tracking files at PPC tracking services such at Hitwise and Onestats.

If they are not, then it is impossible for Google to know what sales were produced for my clients from any organic search or any Adwords campaign. If a store's log files are not secure they could access those but that still would only allow them to access the traffic information, not the sales data. Aso, they cannot know what sales were produced from traffic from other search engines and PPC services.

Of course Google data mines but as I indicated above, there is a world of difference between mining traffic information and being provided with the traffic and exact sale by sale information. That is the part of the equation they need to "maximize their Adwords revenues".