'A 24-Hour Focus Group'

Sites dig into search queries to learn customer preferences

Search engines aren't only a way to empower site visitors with quick access to information. They're also increasingly giving e-businesses insight into what customers want.

Sites have begun scraping and analyzing the questions customers ask in natural-language searches in an effort to fine-tune marketing and product development.

"If lots of people are asking questions on something and they're not finding information, the search engine will tell us," said Joan Broughton, director of Web publishing at Office Depot. "The gist of what they're asking for sometimes isn't clear until you see people asking questions about it over and over."

Search-engine makers are taking advantage of the site operators' curiosities. Vality Technology Inc. this month will release a natural-language search engine that allows consumers to find answers on e-commerce sites. The tool, called eSearch, will be followed later this quarter by a back-office counterpart that allows operators of e-commerce sites to view detailed analyses of questions being asked.

Ask Jeeves, which supplies search technology to big e-commerce sites such as Dell, E-Trade, Nike and Williams-Sonoma, already offers a service called Insight that provides detailed analyses of consumer search patterns. E-retailers can see how many searches used a particular term or how many people are having the same problems with site navigation. They can also preset which patterns to look for.

Ask Jeeves often reveals customer needs that e-retailers were not aware of, customers said. "When you're building a site, you're quite close to it and it's difficult to understand" what types of information customers desire, said Boughton, an Insight customer.

Case in point: Through data that Ask Jeeves supplied, Office Depot officials discovered that visitors often were asking questions about next-day delivery. Answers to those questions were already included under "help" topics, but visitors weren't finding the information easily. That revelation led to a redesign of the help pages.

Although keyword-search engines can tell site operators a lot about their customers, the natural-language engines are even better suited for that activity, experts said. That's because visitors often type full paragraphs into such engines rather than single words or phrases.

"You get in one question an entire snapshot of what's going on in that person's mind," said Michael Callahan, director of advance development at Ask Jeeves.

Ron Goldberg, vice president of content development at Etown.com, a consumer electronics site, said he's considering selling the data gleaned from Jeeves to makers of the products he sells. Etown's Ask Ida service walks consumers through a series of questions as they shop for products, determining which features they value or whether price matters more than features.

In some cases, the manufacturers may learn that consumers don't want features that have been added to products in upgrades, Goldberg said. For example, mined data from Ask Ida may show that buyers of high-definition televisions generally opt for smaller TV screens to save a few dollars. Data from these interactions also can help site operators determine how much information consumers need about products, and how much is overkill.

"You find out how long of an experience people really want," Goldberg said. "At a certain point, people are less interested in features than they are in benefits. Do they really want to know the difference between CDMA and TDMA when they're buying a cell phone?"

Despite these benefits, many companies have failed to take advantage of the information collected by smart search engines, analysts said. Mostly, online merchants "have been emphasizing the core functionality in providing a better search," said analyst Lauren Shu of Gartner Group.

Still, vendors see an expanded role for their technology. "The search technology we want to bring to the market is really a proxy for a skilled salesperson," said Stephen Brown, vice president of product strategy at Vality. Search engines, like salespeople, should use customer interactions as a way to gain a better understanding of what satisfies customers, Brown said.

Rob Wrubel, president and CEO of Ask Jeeves Inc., compares the data garnered from online questions to "a 24-hour focus group."

In some ways, designing an e-commerce site without such insight is guesswork. "If you peel back the lid on how companies publish content, it's a pretty hilarious process," Wrubel said.

Other vendors are cooking up similar products to Insight. French company Albert-Inc is developing a product called Profiler that mines the data in questions using its search engine, said sales manager David Young. The product may use cookies and profiles built with visitors' permission, he said.

Data mined from smart searches can help site operators tap into the minds of visitors, but e-commerce sites have a long way to go in taking advantage of this new technology, analysts said.

"Search engines are a very good and too-often-neglected source of business intelligence," said Hurwitz Group analyst Phillip Russom.