[...] A good review of the event is also available on The Crowdstorm blog. [...]
Sep
03
2008
Shopping Search vs. Recommendation Sites
9 Comments
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:
I cover off some of the points raised in the event below:
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..."Comments
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Sep 3 2008 -
Sep 4 2008
[...] Wilkinson has done an amazing job of writing the gist of it up over here (thus absolving yours truly of the need - props Phil). I’d like to comment on a number of the [...]
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Sep 4 2008
Interesting post.
I think old media is pretty good at giving the punter the space in which to *discover* things (products, places etc) over a long period of time.
New media, mainly owing to different types of search engines and new CPA/CPC ad models, is mighty fine at enabling you to find things quickly.
The internet still doesn't do *discovering* things very well which is why Crowdstorm and other *discovery* sites will have increasing relevance. As a note, I think recommendations are merely a part of this larger *discovery* concept.
As for retailers, even Amazon doesn't have the product coverage to negate the need for a Crowdstorm type product. Example: I live in Dartmoor National Park, love mountains etc. I buy technical outdoor kit (North Face etc) and traditional outdoor kit (Barbour etc) which means that a retailer focused on technical outdoor kit such as Webtogs isn't going to get all my money or attention. There needs to be a product that bridges this and that's not retailer territory.
IMO, the space or gap is always going to be there for *discovery* sites and the market place is wide open at the mo in all categories, whether it be tourism which is the vertical in which I work, or shopping or finance or education etc, etc -
Sep 7 2008
Nice post Phillip, well done.
I strongly agree with James Penman above about the *discovery* issue. The Internet is 99% search and 1% discovery at the moment. I envisage that this is about to change for good. Not 50-50 but discovery will break through quite soon. We already have discovery *paladins* in the music space with Last.fm, in the news space with Digg and in the more generic website space (now also pics and videos) with StumbleUpon.
Anyway, I attended the Chinwag event and I noticed one thing... the recommendation-guys were sort of search-guys anyway. Let me explain it. When I think about recommendations I instinctively associate it with discovery, not with search... but the recommendation-guys on the panel didn't respect this association of mine. The Filter looks to me to be the closest to discovery, but Trustedplaces and Reevoo (both sites that I use and enjoy) are mostly search-driven not just because Google gives them 95% of the traffic but because they're based on a direct relationship between a user's specific need and the satisfaction of it. I need a nice place for my date... let's check Trustedplaces, not Google. I want that LCD TV, let's double check the prices and let's go to Reevoo and find out what other product owners say, not Google. Fair enough. And clever, I like it and I do it.
But there's not that much discovery to me into these mental processes! I have a need and I satisfy it by *searching* for something. The only difference is the place where I search... not Google.
So, to me discovery is something different and it involves latent needs. I like outdoor kit - to use the example above - and although I don't have a specific need at the moment I'd like to discover stuff I'd love and be inspired by *someone* who knows my taste. That someone could be a friend, it could be my Twitter network (too geeky to be mainstream though and hardly scalable/manageable), or it could be a website powered by the community. The Filter - although I need to check it more thoroughly - might be one. Digg is definitely one. Last.fm is one - depending on how you use it. StumbleUpon is another one.
Crowdstorm could be another one as well (although I could use a closer look) but - no offense - it's a bit too much search-focused at the moment. Search in the way I used it above.
Why am I so interested into this discovery issue? Because the start up I run is based on discovery - finally some disclosure you bugger!! :) - and we're working on a new version which puts discovery patterns even more prominently at the core of the business. At the same time I struggle on a daily basis to make people understand - or at least evaluate the opportunity - that searching is great but there's other stuff that we can do to fulfill our needs... present or future, manifested or latent...
It won't be an easy journey but the more people will support the concept of discovery the easier it will get. To close this far too long comment, a while back I met Stumbleupon's founder - Garrett Camp - and he said that (a) discovery is just another form of search, possibly more evolved, and (b) they're still struggling to get this concept into people's heads.
Would love to hear what you guys think about this whole thing.
Cheers,
Fabio -
Sep 8 2008
Hi Fabio,
First, on the theory, I think you're correct. IMO, there will always be a gap between the retailer and the search engine and that gap should be filled with *discovery* engines.
Second, what interests me most at the moment is not the theory (again, I'm sold on that) but the practical steps that entrpreneurs are taking with limited resources (ie here in the UK ;)) to unlock value from the opportunity. It's fascinating to watch how different people address the problem in different verticals (Crowdstorm, TrustedPlaces, hereorthere, growsonYou etc) or in attempting to straddle all verticals(the former RecommendBox approach).
I'd argue that, in 2008, incorporating search into the general opportunity of *discovery* reduces risk as a business as it's how the mass market (individuals and businesses/advertisers) use the net and, critically, if you are building your business by cashflow, it's how you'll get loads of traffic from Google. In 2010, things will probably be different and one would be able to take a different approach.
We all take different approaches but ours would be then to build social networking and user content into the product after that first step.
We'll see how it pans out :) -
Sep 8 2008
James, I'm with you when you say that incorporating search into discovery helps mitigating risks... but I'd argue that discovery needs mavens and risk-takers (kamikaze perhaps) in order to break the 'de facto' hegemony of search.
To put it under a slightly different light, we can't expect people to embrace discovery although a growing number of companies and services will make it their only core business. Probably more VC money should go down that line rather than other directions. -
Sep 9 2008
[...] web sites. The session was very well written up by Phil Wilkinson at Crowd Storm - “Shopping Search vs. Recommendation Sites” - with some excellent thoughts on the dynamics of what Phil describes as the circles of [...]
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Sep 15 2008
The current issue of Web User magazine has a feature about shopping-recommendation websites, in which Crowdstorm gets a 5-star review.
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Oct 16 2008
Talk about a small world.
I run a digital agency and have just had a potential new client on the phone talking about Webtogs - they are taking too much of his online business apparently.
Ever inquisitive I look into this and discover the Webtogs and Crowdstorm connection, which is of interest to me as myself and a colleague (on the side) have launched Tribesmart which is user generated site and based on a community/product discovery model - although granted it's very early days for us.
Cheers fellas and all the best
