EasyAsk and Netrics Inc. have upgraded their search engine technologies that are designed to increase Web sales and customer satisfaction by finding products most appropriate to a viewer's search.
EasyAsk, Littleton, MA, has released EasyAsk 6.0, which now runs on all Java-based software platforms after being tied exclusively to Microsoft Windows programs in previous versions.
The technology applies synonym-based rules to searches and corrects misspelled entries. A search using the phrase “mn's broun bilts” will produce the retailer's selection of large brown belts. The technology can be programmed so that women's brown belts or men's black belts do not result from such an entry.
EasyAsk works with its clients to program the software according to their product marketing needs. Clients can view results of the program and alter how the engine reacts to particular synonyms or misspellings to make it more effective.
David Harris, vice president of marketing at EasyAsk, said the search engine technology produces a success rate of more than 90 percent for reasonably accurate keyword entries, compared with the industry average of around 35 percent.
“The idea is that your customers can find what they want, make a purchase and move on,” he said.
Licenses for the technology start at $30,000 for sites that expect search totals of 50,000 or less each month. Pricing scales higher according to the number of searches a company expects monthly. Additional information can be found at www.easyask.com.
Netrics, Princeton, NJ, increased the scale of its search engine technology — which is called LikeIt — allowing it to handle more than 1 million product entries. The new version also has been enhanced to search through product data and return an answer more quickly.
Similar to EasyAsk, LikeIt has a spell-checker that makes searching for products quicker for viewers. The searches should provide highly relevant product information 99 percent of the time, according to Stefanos Damianakis, president/CEO of Netrics.
“Sometimes [viewers] have to enter three queries to find what they want or get the right choices,” he said. “And sometimes they misspell entries and it comes back with the wrong choices. It can be insulting for the viewer.”
Damianakis said his technology can be used for up to 18 languages. He said international consumer retailers and business-to-business companies are ideal candidates for the software.
LikeIt starts at $10,000 per computer processing unit. Additional information can be found at www.netrics.com.
