Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

First off, I love the idea behind AuctionAds . I have talked to Jeremy a bit and know more than I probably should about how their system works. At this point, however, I'm discontinuing my use of the service. For some sites, it's not a big deal to display whatever shows up. For a commercial site, that's not the case. Our theory was simple. If someone searches on ToolBarn.com for a phrase where we have zero results, show them AuctionAds results to try monetizing that traffic. On the surface, it sounded great. When we started getting complaints on some of the results, we started digging a little deeper. The tests I had done last week were all fairly decent. Talking with Jeremy, I understand that queries that don't get done too often won't have decent results. But when results like pictured below started to show up, I had to pull the plug. Since it's tough to see, here's a zoom on the block in question. Now, I don't know how many sites have had a similar...

For the past several months now, we've been using Kemp LM-1500 load balancers to split the load among multiple web servers. These are pretty simple Linux based load balancers which don't have hard drives - everything is on CF cards. Well, to make our servers even more balanced, we're going to move to load balancing our database servers and our Mini(s). Yes... load balancing replicated database servers isn't unusual. That's actually a lot of the reason that the load balancers have a second network interface. But mini-balancing? Since Google has been generous enough to offer us some cash off of a second mini, we're going to go ahead and look at buying a second one to put behind the load balancers as well. Load balancing a couple of minis will do several nice things for us. 1) If a mini fails or needs rebooted, we will still have a functional site search. 2) We can use one primarily for searching ToolBarn and one primarily for searching ToolPartsDirect, making fo...

Today I received a voicemail from a gentleman asking about customizing the Google mini search appliance's results. He explained that he had asked about adding product images and an "Add to cart" button to the results that the mini kicks out and he was told to check out ToolBarn.com . Well, thanks for the compliment, Google. I'll take that as an indirect Kudos, and you can deposit +3 to our green Kudo meter in your toolbar whenever you'd like. I'll be expecting it by the end of the month, but really... no hurry. ;-)

Ok, so not really. But, they have an easter egg in their search appliances that is sort of funny. If you click on the "About" link at the bottom of the main page, then click on the snowy or sandy looking image along the left side on that page, you end up with the image shown below. I believe they're celebrating it's completion and they're sending it off into the world, but who is this mystery googler in the picture?

I'm taking my time in sharing mini revelations (insights gleamed from reverse engineering our google mini's algorithm.) I've got so many tests planned and want to make sure that the data I'm extracting is accurate. Anyone with an interesting test, let me know. I've been playing around with link order. If I link to a series of pages as linkto1 linkto2 linkto3, does it change anything to reverse that like linkto3 linkto2 linkto1? I've tried playing with that a big, but it's tough to conclusively decide without making 100's of pages exactly the same and reversing the links. Then, I'm having to go back and forth to make sure the results are consistent. I'll be ready to share my observations on this one shortly. I'm all ears for new tests. Brian.

With our Mini, I have been toying with some ways to search for substrings. What I'm finding is that dashes, dots, etc. don't allow for a substring match. However, there is one interesting observation that I have to note here. The first special character is dropped. That's right, be it a dash or a dot, the first one is dropped and ignored. Even when searching, the same behaviour occurs. What does this mean? How can I use it to my advantage? Well, let's take a look at the UB181 example. If I were to make 2 variations of that in our "Additional Keywords" field (only shown to our Mini), simply making ub-181dz and ub181-dz (adding a dash where a letter meets a number, which is a simple regular expression) will not allow these to match a search for 181dz or ub181. Instead, I'd have to make ub-181-dz for a match of ub181 and u-b-181dz for a match of 181dz. That seems like an odd way to have to handle this, but again - simple regular expressions to make this happe...

So I have some major beefs with the Mini and how Google's algo handles stemming / substring matches. This just isn't working right. For example, one of our products is the "UB181DZ". People commonly search for the "UB181", since this is the base model. Well, the default results were 0 matches. That's not good, especially when we have the UB181DZ in stock, along with the DZK and the DZK-2 (we "invented" these kits by customer demand.) So, a simple fix is to pre-fetch substring matches of any skus. I'm doing a "SELECT sku FROM products WHERE sku like '%$searchstring%';" and sending the search as "ub181 OR ub181dz OR ub181dkz OR ub181dzk-2" for now, but that's just not a good long-term solution. It also doesn't work when they search for multiple words. I'd have to make some funky syntax to get that working, and I'm feeling lazy right now. As an experiment, I thought we could try dashes. The first att...

We bought Google. Ok, so it was just a mini , but it's cleared up my understanding of Google a bit. Upon setting it up, nothing really great came to mind. However, after doing some tweaking (it's powering the search on toolbarn.com right now), it has become clear that the more I learn about this box and it's capabilities the more I understand Google. For starters, I ended up having to cloak some pages to our mini to get our results to come out right. A search for makita drills gave me results of milwaukee drills as well because of our breadcrumb navigation and the cross-linking. Every page on our site was returned for power tools because it's in the main navigation. Some searches return poor results, such as makita 5000, which several people have searched for. I have a temp solution in place for that. So, after playing with it and then sitting back to think about how it works / serves results, I figured something out that may end up being priceless. Searches done on our...