Hurray!

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Well while we’ve been making a lot of back-end changes to the site over the last few months, we’ve also been doing a few business deals here and there to:

• Increase the number of products and categories on the site
• Increase and enhance the number of user review sources we import
• Bring more expert sources and partners to the site

Our first announcement concerns the item at the top of the list where we have just signed a deal to try out our first services categories for both broadband and mobile broadband (the one with the little dongles for your laptops. In order to do this, we’re please to announce a deal with Mobile Broadband Genie who will be helping us launch these categories in the next two weeks.

It’s a great deal for us as we get to utilise a vast range of broadband providers, prices, and information to apply the Crowdstorm system and algorithms too.

We’ve got some more announcements too – but one step at a time eh…

Interesting day yesterday as I had a chat with a journalist from RetailWeek and also attended a Chinwag:Live event – all around the topic of how search and recommendation play a role in helping people find what they want. I was actually remarkably quiet during the event, for a change, mainly because my ankle still hurts from falling down a mountain over the weekend – but that’s another story!

So back to the topic – to me of course, my mind applies this in the context of the shopping purchase cycle and how both methods play their part.

First, some definitions of the two approaches:

A: Search

We all know that most people’s journey’s start with visiting the “big G” and typing in a set of 2-4 keywords or phrases, ranging from “find me the best digital camera” to “places to eat near Covent Garden”. You will click one of the results, visit the page, and then continue your journey from there or hit the back button and try the next result down. All pretty familiar stuff. The argument of the search advocates is that this is all you ever need to find the information you are looking for, no matter where you are in the buying process.

B: Recommendation Sites

These try and take the concept of search further in having more detailed, vertical information, and having recommendation engines and social interaction to help people in a better way to find what they are looking for. Examples, of course, are Crowdstorm, TrustedPlaces, and TripAdvisor to name but a few. In these sites you either have a lot of information in one place about a product you are thinking of buying or you can interact with the people and the engine to help you actually make the decision process about what to buy.

So the crux of the argument is which approach is currently being used by the consumers and which is the best approach to give them the best experience.

I cover off some of the points raised in the event below:

1: Recommendation sites need search engines to drive any traffic to them

This one is hard to refute as 95%+ of journey’s start at a search engine and so if you don’t have good content to get ranked, you don’t get the traffic. End of story. Even if your site is good enough to establish a brand and get people coming back directly, even a majority of these people will be lazy and type your name into a search engine. It takes a good 4-5 years before a business is good enough to get people to come directly.

2: Search doesn’t take into account the stage of the purchasing cycle that someone is currently at.

Take the example of typing in “television reviews” – pretty easy to work out what they want but this type of search is tiny traffic compared to words like “televisions” and “sony televisions”. What actually is someone looking for when they type such a generic term – are they looking for product information, ideas to browse around, somewhere to buy it, the best prices and deals, reviews and opinions, or a mixture of all of them… there’s a wide range of possible places to send the visitor to. Search here can really fall down as it really is showing only sites that have designed their content for the search engines and not necessarily relevant content. Take price comparison as an example – how many times have you typed “best price digital cameras” into google and got a range of price comparison sites which you click through to only to find a set of rubbish results. Likewise, if you type “digital camera” into Google – how does looking at one review site or going to a merchant actually help you make that decision? It’s a complex scenario that I don’t think anyone has really nailed yet.

3: If retailers got their acts together, would anyone really need to use recommendation or review sites

A very interesting question. The argument is about where should all the juicy reviews, product information, and recommendations actually sit – at the search engine level, at a product recommendation site, a magazine review site, a price comparison engine, or the end retailer? Take an example: If I want to buy a new rucksack right now that is big enough to take around London for the day and very comfortable to wear on the back and under the arms – where do I go? If I type that into a search engine, I’m going to spend hours wading through crap. Likewise, a magazine review site may be interesting but they rarely cover a big range and you need to dig around a lot. A price comparison site is only going to show me a list of them with prices, and a retailer site will often just show me products with images and a price. It’s a little bit of “jump around a lot and try and fit lots of bits of info together”. Now, take the situation where a retailer site such as Webtogs (note: I’m a shareholder), reaches the point where every product has user reviews and ratings, and a whole section for “Expert advice and community” is created to help users, magazine publishers, and even retailers interact and help people in their purchase decisions, directly on the Webtogs site. Would you need to go anywhere else? Surely recommendation, review, and community sites only exist because retailers can’t or are scared to implement this kind of thing? You can argue that companies such as Reevoo and Bazaarvoice help by handling the review capture for retailers, but this is only a small part of the picture.

4: There are other forms of communication that can help in the buying process that miss out both search engines and recommendation sites altogether

Twitter was mentioned as a good example of this where someone asked their friends and followers “what digital slr should I buy made by Canon?” and got a raft of good responses. These ranged from actual product recommendations to pointing them to sites and discussion forums where people were already taking about this kind of thing and helping each other out. You also consider social environments such as facebook, blogs, and even traditional emails of course – and the bigger puzzle of how to interact with them. Are we actually trying something which is not possible by bringing all these communication methods together under one vertical site or product?

5: Do people really care about trust?

So one of the main arguments about why recommendation sites can top results from a search engine, is over the degree of trust they can utilise between sources and people. Google uses it’s algorithm to try and work out which sites are the most relevant and trusted by other “website owners” where as recommendation sites try and show reviews and comments filtered by trusted people in the community or network who have something valuable to say and not just trying to game the system. The question then becomes, do you trust reviews on a retailer site when you don’t know who the people are behind them, a site that comes up on Google just because it is in the listings, or do you prefer to know a bit about the people writing the content and why you should trust them. Perhaps we do, as our friends and colleagues are always trusted more than anonymous people. What would you prefer – 2 recommendations from a friend and colleague or 45 reviews from anonymous people? I haven’t found any data to support either side right now but it’s an interesting question nonetheless that needs some answers.

Conclusion

This entire space about how people choose and recommend products and services to each other is much more complicated than I ever imagined, and luckily I’m not the only one who thinks that! I think the issue really comes down to their being so many different ways and methods of researching things online and every type of site trying to work out where they fit into the equation. Should a price comparison site focus on that end step of finding the best price and buying or should they move more into product reviews and community?

Should retailers focus on despatching the goods to the customer and getting a good range of selection, or should they also be providiing reviews and community content and advice to help people make the right decision? Should recommendation sites fill the gaps they leave right now and if so, is it a long term solution? Finally, what about the mighty G – don’t they see themselves as the main gateway to the final destination sites and will do everything they can to own every single journey right up until the final purchase?

As Terry Pratchett once said “We live in interesting times…”

Just a quick post to say the Crowdstorm team are back in action after a good 4 week break – so don’t worry, we haven’t let the blog go to waste.  In fact, the next post in a few minutes is a very detailed one about Search vs. Recommendation Sites – hurrah!

With everyone talking about the possible features in the new upcoming iPhone V2 – I thought it was actually worth a piece on a range of user interface improvements they could offer at the same time. Some of which you’ve probably been inwardly fuming about but never really thought it deserved enough energy to mention.. so here we go..

1. SMS and Phone should not be separate. The Phone area has contacts, voicemail etc.. but not the SMS option which would fit much more nicely in this section rather than being an independent icon and area. Americans – please listen – SMS is not some new fangled phone add-on.
2. Contacts needs a “search” function. There are numerous occasions where I can only remember a surname or the company the person works for – don’t make me drill alphabetically through the entire list. Sure, I can reverse how the names are sorted in terms of first or surname first – but this is a pain to keep changing and doesn’t help when I need the company name.
3. Clicking a phone number in email / Safari should be cleverer. I like the feature to click a number and it immediately starts to dial it – but please start to handle country codes better! If someone types +1 (0)233 34434 – it tries to dial the entire thing including the number in brackets and of course fails. Learn that a number in bracket is optional and only used if the country code preceeded by the plus symbol is not used.
4. You can’t switch to something else while listening to a voicemail. Often someone leaves a message from a “blocked” number and reads out the number I should call them back on via the voicemail message. So what I try and do is flick to the dialpad to type in the number as they read it to me, yet the voicemail then stops and needs to be played again. Pah.
5. Calendar needs a search function too. If it’s supposed to be a mirror of iCal – put the search in!
6. Stop overwriting Safari windows. I’ve noticed in the latest software that if you click a link from an email to open up a new window in Safari, it will tend to overwrite something you’ve previously had open if the maximum number of windows are already open. I’ve left a webpage up their once to come back to later only to find the iPhone has loaded a new page over it.
7. Finally, have a single button easily accessible from the main menu that lets me turn on and off any battery-sapping features in one go – wi-fi, bluetooth, and now 3G. Do we really need to keep going to settings all the time…

Hurray – we’ve finally got our much improved site out there for Crowdstorm UK and Crowdstorm USA

We’re concentrating on making it stable now, ironing out the remaining 67 bugs, and ensuring the speed is high enough. If you see any bugs or want to make some general feedback – use the green link at the top of the page, fill in your comments, then press submit. We’re not making a big fuss about this one as we’ve still lots of things to do to it.

You’ll notice we’re now importing a lot more content in user reviews and expert reviews, and we’ve got a few deals to announce in the next few weeks. Also – welcome to our new Television and DVD Player categories!

Key things still to do:

• Clean & simplify a few of the pages
• Implement new designs for user profiles and dashboard
• Work on a smoother login process
• Make it easier to ask questions and submit other content types
• Improving the algorithms for Crowd recommendations, related review content etc..
• Rewrite and check all the emails and alerts we send to users
• Watch and monitor how everybody uses the site so we can improve things..

Lastly, as mentioned above – this is a quiet release and we don’t want anyone blogging it in the current format, if you don’t mind. Ta very much.

We’re having to write some new features and code for the next site iteration Project “Typhoon” due in the next few weeks, and thought that we should put some of them live at least on the current site to get some testing and feedback from everyone.

So, as of this morning (taking no responsibility for the bugs) – we’ve deployed a new Site Search and much better Filter Options for browsing attributes and review content types (e.g. video, expert reviews). So in more detail:

Site Search

Before we had some sort of weird hybrid thing whereby you would type something in the box and then it would display the results in a small cramped lightbox. Often there were no results as it was locked down to only matching exact terms for the two categories (cameras and games) tha we have deployed.

Well, know we’ve opened it up to be a full search results page that queries not only products but every single piece of review content we have brought into the platform. That includes expert reviews, user reviews, videos, question and answers, and thoughts:

So we obviously still need to work on relevancy of the thing and of course keep importing more and more content to get better results – but now is a great time to get some feedback on how we could do better when it goes into the new release. So please give it a go, for example with terms such as Canon Eos 40d

Improved Filter Options & Content Types

We’ve split out Expert Reviews & User Reviews so they have their own objects now and also replaced “comments” with Thoughts which is designed to be short pieces of text that people just want to say about a product or about the category generally (e.g. strongly recommend buying blu-ray now as HD-DVD has lost). We’re debating whether we even let people leave these thoughts without having to login… what do you think?

Really would appreciate any feedback so far and any bugs you find.. What would you improve?

I got collared by the Intruder chaps (Vincent & Eugene) the other week whilst coming out of the OpenCoffee event in Waterstones. Here’s how it went:

Have a great holiday and we’ll be back in the new year with a whole heap of announcements. Thanks for everyone’s support this year – we couldn’t have done it without you.

Oh, and remember you can always come to Crowdstorm UK or Crowdstorm USA when you’ve got your gifts and want to tell the world how good or bad they are!

We’re really pleased to be nominated for the social shopping category in the Open Web Awards run by Mashable. It’s great to be noticed and we’ve got some tough competition, and as of the last count, we’re about 25% behind the leader! So – every vote counts right now and we’d really appreciate it if you could quickly vote for us with just a single button click on their site, via the button below:

I know it’s a PR thing but it’s important for us and we would get to go to San Francisco to the awards ceremony. In fact, if you get us the most votes through your company – I’ll get the whole Crowdstorm team to wear your company t-shirts to the event – how’s that?