Improving Coriandr’s search
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Over the last week we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to improve Coriandr’s search. Our aim is simple enough;
“make it easier to find the right things, quicker.”
As a marketplace, our opportunity to provide a great shopping experience starts with the search. The idea that gangs of buyers could be roaming the vaults of Coriandr, lost and alone, unable to find the one item that would complete them, is a very sad thing indeed! So much depends on the search doing it’s job well.
So, what are the plans?
- Make it easier to search. We’re going to be making some alterations to the way the search page looks and behaves. None of the existing search criteria will go, but the ease with which you can search for keywords, add tags, and generally browse through all the items on offer will be vastly improved.
- Allow more complicated searches. The best way to improve the accuracy of the search is to let you build more complicated searches in the first place. Rather than search for “fathers or father or day” and sift through 500 items, you’ll be able to search for “fathers (or father) and day not card”. Sound complicated? It won’t be, but it will mean that you’ll be able to find the right gifts much quicker.
- Build better ways to browse. Not only do we want to improve the efficiency of the search but also introduce some novel, and above all, fun ways of browsing Coriandr. Step from favourite to favourite, or see all the bracelets for sale in East Anglia, or perhaps you need to accessorise another purchase using a specific colour? Over the coming months we’ll be introducing all sorts of fun ways to browse the site.
- Build relationships between items. In a similar vein to Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…“ feature, we’ve begun to gather information that will allow us to build connections between related items and make meaningful item suggestions to potential buyers.
In order to make all these changes, we first need to improve the speed of the search itself, and that’s just what we’ve been doing this past week; running tests on various searches and tweaking the performance here and there. So far the results have been nothing short of fantastic, with the largest improvement being the reduction of one search down from 9.5s to 0.16s! We’ve still got a lot more tweaking to go, but plan to get the search speed improvements wrapped up in the next week or so, and then move straight onto the other, more tangible search improvements. Rest assured, we’ll keep you updated as we go!
1 Comment to Improving Coriandr’s search
Sounds great, thanks for the update!
June 12, 2009