For the last few years, we’ve used SLI Systems Search for web site search on both Fright Catalog and YumDrop. When we started the Import Costumes project, we decided that we’d try something different because of the increasing cost of using SLI’s service. The cost is based on the number of search queries, so the more popular the site’s become, the more the cost of search increases.

Instead of building out our own search functionality, we decided to purchase a Google Mini on the recommendation of a fellow e-tailer we know. They said the integration was fairly easy and for their searching needs, it fit the bill. So we decided to give it a shot. For the $1,995 that it cost, we’ll definitely save some money on search in the long term. We knew that we’d be giving up some of the features we get with SLI, most notably how SLI’s search algorithm “learns” different searching patterns and improves the results for any given search term as well as “automatic” related and suggested search terms.

The biggest task for the Mini’s integration was the refining of search queries. SLI allows us to refine by category and price, so we wanted to be able to do the same thing with the Mini. Luckily, you can do this by searching meta tags for different values. It took a while to figure out that some of the search parameters like as_q and partialfields weren’t working as I expected so I ended up building the query term much like you’d use on Google, i.e. site:importcostumes.com inmeta:price:$10.00..$20.00 parrot where you’re looking for parrot type products from $10 to $20.

Since product content doesn’t change all that often, we’ve also been able to cache search results as XML files on the file system. We keep them around for a 24 hour period, just in case something does change. This is great because it’ll keep some load off of the Google Mini while speeding up displaying results to our customers for popular search criteria.

We’ll definitely miss out on the learning capabilities of SLI and not being able to automatically have related and suggested search terms is a bummer. That might be something that the Google Search Appliance can do easier since you can upload data feeds to it. Maybe we’ll graduate up to that as we get more of our sites running search from the Mini. Adding them by hand is a pain, though you can batch upload them. Even with that, you still have to manually build your lists.

One other feature that I’d like to see from the Mini (if anyone from Google is reading this) is a way to automate the emailing of search reports on a regular basis. It’d be nice to have a report sent to me monthly with top search terms as well as the results they returned. This is great for deciding what product to buy and what product to sell aggressively.