The man behind Stone Temple has got some great material that simply hasn't been getting the attention it deserves. First off, there's this from his interview of Tim Mayer:
Eric: We saw in the documentation for Search Builder that putting a site into the search engine triggers a basic crawl. Can you tell us more about how that works?
Tim: What it does is to evaluate your site and potentially perform a deeper crawl of your site. For example a lot of people want to create site search. With that, you want a comprehensive search of the site. Sometimes the site is fairly well indexed. What we're saying is if you use Search Builder, we'll potentially include more of your documents into our index.
It's an incentive for people to use the Search Builder product on their site.
Let me just replay that for you in case you glossed over it - Tim Mayer just told us that a very good way to get your site more comprehensively spidered by Yahoo! is to employ Search Builder. Done and done, Tim. I've got a few clients who will be signing up very quickly.
The other piece comes, ironically, from another interview, this one with a great compatriot of mine, Dennis Mortensen of Indextools (SEOmoz's analytics vendor of choice):
The tool itself doesn't really do anything; it's the analyst. You can set the tool up to do certain reports, to investigate something, or to alert you on specific metrics; but the tool itself doesn't really do anything, it's a reporting tool. You need some kind of analyst, or you need some kind of objective that you measure on and take action on, before there will be any return on investments on a web analytics tool. This is actually part of our sales pitch. If you are going out and spending $100,000 on an Omniture solution; that might be your budget. You can actually have an IndexTools solution for $30,000, and hire a web analyst for the remaining $70,000, and you will probably have ten times the effect on your web site results by doing that.
Whenever folks ask me about why I use Indextools over Omniture (despite the day-parting and a few other advanced features), I'm going to use that exact logic. Dennis' points about click fraud, cookie setting and why he often recommends Google Analytics are also worth reading.
Thanks, Eric - you've gone far beyond the scope of most interviews we see in this space and for that, we're in your debt.
Hey Rand,
Thanks for the great coverage. I truly appreciate it. Note that we will be publishing a new interview with different players in the search and analytics spaces every Monday for the forseeable future. We have some great people coming up, including:
Jim Sterne (well know analytics pundit) Gary Price (Ask.com) Eric Peterson (well known analytics pundit) Mark Lucovsky (Google Ajax search engines) Avinash Kaushik (well known analytics pundit)
Should be fun stuff. Thanks again!
Cheers,
Eric
Here's another interesting observation that I would love to hear validated by someone else.
I created a YSB search engine pointing (only) to my site.
Now, in Yahoo Site Explorer, under "source" for my site, there's a link with anchor text "Search Builder". When clicked on, this link goes to my YSB page. Kinda feels like it's related to the notion of YSB's triggering deeper crawls.
I had never heard of the Stonetemple site, have bookmarked it now though. Really good interviews!
My company has been using Google Analytics for the last 1 1/2 but we have been looking for a new analytics solution as GA have it's limits (especially when it comes to conversion tracking). We are testing Indextools this month, and so far it's looking really good.
Totally agree that it's all about the analyst, no point in spending loads of money on a analytics software if you don't have a proper analyst to analyse the results.
I'm not ready to jump ship and use Yahoo Search Builder. I find Yahoo already indexs most /all of the pages on the sites I work with. I enjoyed the resource links on this post though, first time I had visited Stone Temple, at least from what I remember. I visit more sites then I can recall and I don't have enough time to go back through my social bookmarks very often.
That's interesting about the Search Builder.
I wonder if it would also work when you add it temporarily, just to have everything indexed and then ditch it again. I don't think I would want to include Yahoo search in my site forever. Will try it out.
Nice find Rand. I suspect we'll be seeing a few more internal Search Builder search engines on new sites. The rest of the interview is a good read as well.
I've been surprised that there hasn't been more talk about Search Builder. Google's vertical search has been talked up quite a bit, byt Yahoo was a few months earlier to release their product.
Hi rand,
That’s cool… thanks Eric. It’s very nice; I have placed in my site…
Thanks Rand
Thank you for the insight. I tip my cap to you ladies and sirs! I am sure our customers will appreciate the knowledge as well. Thank you on behalf of them as well.
ST looks interesting. Good find.
It's too F'ing wide to put anywhere on my site. I love how Yahoo has a minimum size of 300 px.
Has anyone been able to integrate this on a blog? The width of the search box doesn't fit anywhere on my blogs.
Interesting choice of words Rand.
Really? I thought they were kind of dull. If he had said something like, "Booger fetish mozilla magenta Oxycontin goblin" then that would be an interesting choice of words.