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Google Commerce Search Shelved By Google

Going Out of BusinessBack in January at NRF’s 102nd Annual Convention & EXPO we heard rumors that Google was closing down Google Commerce Search. We called, we emailed, but nobody at Google would confirm. Last Thursday, An article in TechCrunch formally announced that Google is “Quietly Shuttering Commerce Search for E-Retailers.”

For any company left in the lurch by this announcement, please check out EasyAsk’s GCS Replacement Program. EasyAsk eCommerce Edition is a has over 19 years worth of R&D, and is deployed on some of the most popular sites on the Internet, including The North Face, Land’s End, J.Jill, Coldwater Creek and TrueValue Hardware.

We’rre not bashful about telling you that we have the best site search available!  Out-of-the box, EasyAsk regularly delivers a 50 to 100 percent visitor-to-buyer conversion improvement. Once results are tuned, sites running EasyAsk have realized improvements of 800 percent or more.

We provide amazing customer support and we’ll help you get up and running quickly. Plus, we’re offering free implementation for the first 5 companies that call us at 781-402-5641 or register on our site to switch.

 

 

 

 

 

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Easyask Announces Google Commerce Search Replacement Program

Calling All Google Commerce Search Customers, Get Significantly Better Search and Drive More Revenue with EasyAsk Natural Language Site Search, Navigation and Merchandising and Receive Free Standard Implementation

Burlington, MA – 28 January 2013 – EasyAsk, the Natural Language technology and solutions leader, today announced a replacement program for all customers using Google Commerce Search. The replacement program provides Google Commerce Search customers with dramatically improved Site Search, Navigation and Merchandising, resulting in higher revenue and increased profits.  And to simplify the migration, EasyAsk is offering free standard implementation services to the first five customers who call 800.425.8200 ext. 5641 or register on our website.

The search industry is undergoing an enormous change as the largest companies in the world evolve from simple Keyword Search to a more advanced, semantic Natural Language search model.  IBM Watson, Apple Siri, and even Google Internet search are now deploying smarter search algorithms that don’t rely on Keyword Search. Since 2001, EasyAsk has lead the industry in providing the fastest, most accurate search results for online shoppers using Natural Language search that understands the context of the search query.  The result is dramatically more accurate search results, significantly higher customer conversion, increased revenues and profits.

“Keyword Search is dead. Even Google Internet search has abandoned its’ old Keyword Search for a new semantic-based model. However Google has neglected to deploy this capability to their Commerce product.  EasyAsk eCommerce Edition has helped hundreds of customers achieve industry-leading conversion rates that dramatically increase their eCommerce revenues,” said Craig Bassin, CEO of EasyAsk. “Our intelligent search, navigation and merchandising capabilities deliver the right products on the very first page to speed customer purchases.  In addition, every EasyAsk powered site delivers a rich, Siri-like voice-driven search for mobile shopping on smart phones out of the box.  EasyAsk is leading the next wave of mobile commerce.”

EasyAsk eCommerce Edition customers include well-known brands such as Lands’ End, Coldwater Creek, Joann Fabrics, InkJet Superstore and True Value Hardware. EasyAsk can be deployed on any eCommerce environment, including Websphere Commerce, Magento, Netsuite SuiteCommerce, and others.

To take advantage of EasyAsk’s Google Commerce Search Replacement Program, please call 800.425.8200 ext 5641 or register on our website.

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk is radically changing the speed and ease of how people find information through ground-breaking Natural Language search software. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional search, allowing users to simply ask questions in plain English and receive highly tuned results. EasyAsk eCommerce Edition uses this unique technology to deliver industry-leading website search, navigation and merchandising solutions that boost online revenue through increased conversion rates, improved customer experience and agile merchandising.

Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices in Europe, EasyAsk has long been a leader in natural language information analysis and delivery software. Customers such as The North Face, Coldwater Creek, Lands’ End, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, TrueValue, Siemens, JoAnn Fabrics and Harbor Freight Tools rely on the EasyAsk software products to run their business and eCommerce operations daily.

For further information please visit www.easyask.com.

 

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EasyAsk FAQ for Google Commerce Search Customers

 

How does EasyAsk compare to Google Commerce Search?

GCS Comparison Chart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is EasyAsk?

EasyAsk is a site search, navigation and merchandising solution for e-retail, mobile commerce and B2B commerce sites. Powered by EasyAsk’s Natural Language and Semantic processor and high speed pre-index, EasyAsk is a fast flexible, and easy option for e-commerce Search. See transparently what is happening within the search engine as it automagically understands shopper intent with Natural Language. Consider “warm yellow jackets” vs “warm weather yellow jackets.” Take full control of the search engines in various ways, synonyms, spelling, semantic relevancy, targeted promotions and much more.

How long does EasyAsk take to deploy?

Time to deploy depends on the size and complexity of your online store. As a hosted solution with no hardware or onsite deployment requirements, EasyAsk can be implemented very quickly.

How do I put EasyAsk results on my site?

  • Sign up for EasyAsk eCommerce Editon
  • Upload your product files (manually or via APIs)
  • Plug-in the EasyAsk APIs  (or use one of our e-commerce Platform connectors)

How do I sign up for EasyAsk?

Visit the Products page to learn more or go to the contact page to reach a sales representative about this program.

What are the different customization options available?

EasyAsk is fully customizable. Through the Commerce Studio you can tailor the search experience exactly to your needs. Control term definitions, synonyms, redirects and landing pages; create facets and manage their order; tune the ranking system to your needs; specify product promotions; tie these and more merchandising changes to a sale or other event. Change the look and feel of your search engine and results page, use it with your mobile apps, customer service or integrate results into many other applications with the XML API.

When is EasyAsk 12.0 available? Do I have to do anything special to get it?

EasyAsk 12.0 is available immediately for all our customers. As a hosted offering in the cloud, product updates are rolled out automatically; as such, existing customers will automatically receive the new features and all new customers to EasyAsk eCommerce Edition will automatically be on the 12.0 platform. For sites running the EasyAsk installed on their own servers, all upgrades are included – please contact [email protected] for download instructions.

What is new in EasyAsk 12.0?

EasyAsk 12.0 drives conversion and improves customer experience. It helps shoppers find items easily, quickly and interactively, from anywhere and from any device. It also provides sites with more control and total transparency into what is being searched.

  • Search Engine Optimization – the new search site map generator provides integration with internet search engines to optimize the exposure and ranking of products in consumer searches.
  • Search As You Type – EasyAsk can now automatically provide intelligence suggestions to visitors as they type searches in the search box.  Suggestions are based on the rich site history and analytics maintained by EasyAsk.
  • Product Variants/SKU Level Processing – EasyAsk now supports product and SKU level relationships, allowing hierarchical and matrix product and SKU search results to be optimally managed and displayed in e-commerce sites. Show the yellow images for a search on “yellow jackets”.
  • NetSuite SuiteCommerce integration – integration with NetSuite SuiteCommerce including automated item catalog extraction via NetSuite SuiteCloud web services, and optimized e-commerce site integration for superior SEO and integrated look and feel. View more information on EasyAsk eCommerce Edition for NetSuite.
  • Product Review attributes – EasyAsk search and navigation can now include product review data from vendors such as BazaarVoice.  This allows visitors to search using product review criteria – i.e. “black loafers under $70 with 4 star reviews” – see review information as attributes in the navigation, and use review information inside search business rules to raise products in results or drive related offers or promotions.
  • Integration with product recommendation engines – EasyAsk search results can now include associated product recommendations driven by product recommendation engines such as Rich Relevance and Certona.

How much does EasyAsk cost?

Pricing depends on the volume of search traffic, and the number of items you upload. For further details on pricing, please contact an EasyAsk representative directly at 800.425.8200.

How many languages is EasyAsk available in?

EasyAsk eCommerce Edition is available in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and will be rolled out in many additional languages soon. If a language you need is not currently supported, please contact us for an update on local launch timing.

 

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EasyAsk Google Commerce Search Replacement Program

Online Shopping

Calling All Google Commerce Search Customers!

Get Significantly Better Search and Drive More Revenue with EasyAsk Natural Language Site Search, Navigation and Merchandising and Receive Free Standard Implementation.

The replacement program provides Google Commerce Search customers with dramatically improved Site Search, Navigation and Merchandising, resulting in higher revenue and increased profits. And to simply the migration, EasyAsk is offering free standard implementation to the first five customers who call 800.425.8200 or register here.

EasyAsk has helped customers achieve industry-leading conversion rates that dramatically increase their e-commerce revenues. The intelligent search, navigation and merchandising capabilities of EasyAsk eCommerce Edition deliver the right products on the very first page to speed customer purchases.

EasyAsk customers include well-known brands such as The North Face, Journey’s, Anna’s Linens, InkJet Superstore and True Value Hardware. EasyAsk can be deployed on any e-commerce environment, including Websphere Commerce, Magento, Netsuite SuiteCommerce, and others.

Still need more information? Please read our FAQ.

Be among the first 5 companies to take advantage of this offer! Call 800.425.8200 or register here today.

 

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FOLLOWING EXPLOSIVE GROWTH IN 2012, EASYASK EXPANDS INTO EUROPE

Advanced eCommerce Natural Language Site Search Technology Goes Global, Supports Any eCommerce Platform, Including Magento, Websphere Commerce, Netsuite SuiteCommerce and Others

Reading, UK and Burlington, MA – 22 January 2013 – EasyAsk, the natural language technology and solutions leader, today announced the opening of EasyAsk’s first European office at Thames Valley Park, Reading, UK.

In 2012, EasyAsk grew revenues by 40% and increased its customer base by 22% with new names including The North Face, Anna’s Linens and Cigars International.

Gartner listed EasyAsk as Cool Vendor for BI and Analytics and cited the company as “one of the premier ecommerce search and merchandizing software providers” in its research: Best Practices in Strategically Combining Search, Content Analytics and E-Commerce.

Building on its successful expansion in the US over the last 24 months, EasyAsk will now have a local presence to support leading European brands who are looking to increase website conversions and revenue with Site Search, Navigation and Merchandising. Highly experienced technology executives Simon Persse and Robin Aitken, who between them have over 30 years’ experience in the eCommerce and search sector, lead the EasyAsk Europe team. Simon has held a variety of senior roles, most recently with Compario as well as ATG, Oracle and Endeca while Robin has held senior positions with ATG, Apptus and Demand247.

“This is an exciting time for EasyAsk as brands look for best-in-class solutions to support the changing needs of their consumers”, explains Simon Persse, VP Sales Europe. “EasyAsk’s unparalleled track record of delivering value for major retail brands in the US coupled with the adoption of smart phones and tablets by consumers mean it is more important than ever for brands to deliver effective search and navigation options across a broad range of devices. EasyAsk is able to deliver this capability extremely quickly regardless of the existing IT infrastructure.”

“The search industry as a whole is evolving from simple keyword search to a more intelligent, highly tuned semantic and natural language model,” said Craig Bassin, EasyAsk CEO.  “Nowhere are the results more evident than in eCommerce search.  EasyAsk delivers dramatic performance improvements in search and merchandizing that directly improve net profits for retailers.  We realized explosive growth in 2012 and are poised to continue this growth trajectory in 2013. We expect a good portion of this growth to come from our expansion into Europe, where Forrester Research predicts that eCommerce sales are expected to increase to €133.6 bn by 2015.”

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk is radically changing the speed and ease of how people find information through ground-breaking natural language search software. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional search, allowing users to simply ask questions in plain English and receive highly tuned results. EasyAsk eCommerce Edition uses this unique technology to deliver industry-leading website search, navigation and merchandising solutions that boost online revenue through increased conversion rates, improved customer experience and agile merchandising. EasyAsk Quiri , mobile Siri-like CRM for smartphones and Business Edition revolutionize enterprise decision-making, moving beyond traditional business intelligence solutions with easy, low-cost deployment and a unique natural language interface that extends access to information anywhere in the organization.

Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices in Europe, EasyAsk has long been a leader in natural language information analysis and delivery software. Customers such as The North Face, Coldwater Creek, Lands End, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, TruValue, Siemens, JoAnn Fabrics and Harbor Freight Tools rely on the EasyAsk software products to run their business and eCommerce operations daily.

For further information please visit www.easyask.com.

 

 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose

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EasyAsk for Websphere Commerce

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Websphere Commerce is the fastest growing eCommerce platform on the market, with features that make it easy to build and deploy eCommerce sites, as well as manage eCommerce operations.

While Websphere Commerce provides a great foundation, adding EasyAsk gets you significantly better site search, navigation and merchandising solution.

With EasyAsk on top of your Websphere Commerce Platform visitors will find products faster and quickly be converted from shoppers to buyers, which will increase your customer conversion rates, order sizes and overall e-commerce revenue.

We guarantee your conversion rates will increase with EasyAsk. Fill out the form to download the white paper and learn more.

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EasyAsk for Magento

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Magento is the fastest growing e-commerce platform on the market, with features that make it easy to build and deploy e-commerce sites, as well as manage eCommerce operations.

While Magento provides a great foundation, adding EasyAsk gets you significantly better site search, navigation and merchandising solution.

With EasyAsk on top of your Magento eCommerce Platform visitors will find products faster and quickly be converted from shoppers to buyers, which will increase your customer conversion rates, order sizes and overall e-commerce revenue.

We guarantee your conversion rates will increase with EasyAsk. Fill out the form to download the white paper and learn more.

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Search and E-Commerce SEO

We often need to educate people on the strong link (no pun intended!) between eCommerce Site Search and SEO. And it is bit disheartening to see the lack of general education in the market on this subject.

Many companies spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to optimize their SEO and adwords spend each year. Yet, if you are using the right e-commerce search engine, many of the answers you need to optimized SEO and adwords might be sitting right in front of you… for free!

The searches customers perform on your site, specifically, the long tail searches, can provide vital information about how customers want to find you on the internet search engines. These searches give you exact places where you can tune your SEO and Adwords to promote these products and give you a leg up on your competition – customers find you and these products faster.

Of course, a critical piece of this is an e-commerce site search engine that delivers accurate long tail searches and offering ways to tune links for optimal SEO. Natural language is the best at delivering long tail, descriptive searches. Also, the e-commerce search engine needs to offer fast, easy to use analytics (you don’t want to be trolling through logs!).

Make these two capabilities a distinctive part of your e-commerce strategy to deliver better SEO and a better customer experience.

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Intelligent Search: What Google’s New “Semantic Search” Means for Search on your e-Commerce Site

BY EasyAsk CEO Craig Bassin

Google has recently announced that it is adding more “semantic search” techniques into its otherwise largely keyword search. This means matching on the meaning of words, rather than just the occurrence of words. Since nearly all of your customers also use Google, their expectations for search are conditioned by Google. Over time, there is a trickle-down in the expectation that shoppers have of search, based largely on their experience on Google.

Therefore, it’s a reasonable question to ask: “What changes should I make in search at my commerce site to keep pace with customer expectations?” Beyond keeping pace with expectations, there is another even more important reason to invest in semantic search on your site — increased conversion rate. Analysis of Neilsen netRatings conversion rate studies across similar e-commerce sites has not only confirmed the impact of natural language semantic search, it has actually measured it!

What is Semantic Search?
The literal definition of semantic search is searching on meaning rather than searching on words. Google is now knocking at the door of semantic search by associating word groups as concepts. If some people search on “beach sandals” and other people search on “beach flip-flops”, while both groups click to show interest in the same item set, then the concept “sandal” and “flip-flop” may be related. The distillation of words into concepts is one part of the greater field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Searching on concepts in their various forms delivers more complete results and is more tolerant of user search variations. As you have seen, semantic search is quite valuable – but there is more power available when you go deeper using more NLP techniques.

A semantic search with deeper NLP (let’s call this Natural Language Search, or NLS) support brings even more converting power to a commerce site. Lets look at these two commerce searches, “return policy” and “sweaters under $100”. Searching all your product descriptions for the words “return” and “policy” will clearly lead to ridiculous results. Clearly, the intent of this search is to display your policy on returns – treating this as a phrase and recognizing its special nature are important to the shopper, and easy with NLS.

Similarly, treating “under $100” as a keyword search will yield undesirable results. The intent of the user is to restrict the products based on price. Recognizing that “$100” is not a word, but rather a price requires something smarter than a keyword search. This occurs in other forms when the user wants to express a range restriction, not just on price, but any other numerical product attribute such as length, weight or wattage.

Units of measure commonly stump keyword search engines. For example, keyword searching for “12 volt 24 amp motor” will unfortunately return all motors with 12 or a 24 anywhere in the description. Thus, both 24 volt 12 amp motors as well as 24 watt .5 amp motors with a 12″ shaft will be shown! If your site gets lots of dimensional/size searches, the capabilities of NLS is absolutely critical. A semantic search with NLP is aware of units of measure, such as “volt”, “v” or “amp”, “A”. This unit of measure awareness automatically creates a phrase around “12 volt”, and to include searches on variations like “12V” or “12 V”. When a shopper searches for “Nike size 10”, NLS will recognize that “size” is an attribute with numeric values & therefore select the products with “size=10”. These capabilities impact countless unique searches that would otherwise stump almost all search engines.

These examples illustrate how easy it is for dumb keyword searches to yield embarrassing results. Have you ever searched a site only to see hundreds of irrelevant results? This not only reflects poorly on your brand, but can actually cause you to lose customers! Nearly all of us have had the experience of getting such poor results from a search on a commerce site. We get frustrated and leave the site altogether to buy from another site. This illustrates how improving search can improve conversion rate.

In order to measure the correlation between semantic search and conversion rate, we used Nielsen netRatings to compare the conversion rates of sites that were similar except for their use of semantic search. We compared sites for catalog companies and non-catalog companies separately. In both groups, the sites using semantic NLP search had about 20% higher conversion rate than the sites using keyword search. Of course, there are many other phenomena that impact conversion rate, but these would generally balance out across all the groups. Furthermore, the 20% improvement is consistent with the uplift we see when customers switch from keyword search to semantic search. Details of the Nielsen study are available on request.

Google is moving the world towards semantic search. Eventually user expectations will demand it from your commerce site as well. Switch sooner rather than later – you’re leaving money on the table every day until you make the switch!

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EasyAsk Partners with Explore Consulting to Help Fusion Beads – a NetSuite E-Commerce Site – to Improve Search and Navigation

Partnership offers e-retailing customers, including those of Fusion Beads, improved shopping experience

EasyAsk, the leading provider of natural language solutions and technology, and Explore Consulting, a professional services company that provides innovative technology solutions for managing business data and a cost-effective approach to completely outsourced IT in the cloud, today announced a partnership to deliver natural language e-commerce solutions to retailers using the NetSuite e-commerce platform. Additionally, the companies announced a successful deployment at Fusion Beads (www.fusionbeads.com), an online store offering a wide selection of products and information to the beading community.

“The Fusion Bead deployment is a good example of what the Explore Consulting and EasyAsk partnership is aimed at providing,” says Steve Jones, CEO of Explore Consulting. “The partnership offers all types of e-commerce retailers the most advanced search and navigation and intuitive merchandising tools – cost-effectively and very quickly – especially on the NetSuite platform.”

EasyAsk’s NetSuite integration works from within the NetSuite pages, ensuring that page content is search engine friendly and utilizes the item records in NetSuite accounts to maintain centralization of data. Item attributes are configured in NetSuite and the EasyAsk Business Studio is used to configure search and navigation rules based on the attributes a merchandiser wants to use. EasyAsk is similarly tightly integrated with Magento, as well as other popular e-commerce platforms.

After selecting NetSuite as a new e-commerce platform, Fusion Beads turned to Explore Consulting and EasyAsk because they wanted to make it easier for their customers to navigate the wide range of products offered through their website – more than 50,000 items. Not only does Fusion Beads offer a lot of products, but they also catalog a tremendous amount of product and project data to ensure their customers are getting what they need. With the EasyAsk solution, Fusion Beads can now configure down to the item level the product attributes that should be used for search and navigation from over 600 custom item fields they currently use.

“We turned to NetSuite when the Fusion Beads Website became too large to maintain manually,” said Gunilla Eriksson, Director of Online Operations at Fusion Beads. “Additionally, we needed EasyAsk to help us manage search and navigation with our large product catalog and to display, in parallel, relevant projects ideas to our customers. Now shoppers can own their own search and view projects and products in one page. People love it and we love it. It works so much easier.”

“EasyAsk is very excited about the Explore Consulting partnership and the value we are adding at Fusion Beads,” said Marc Schnabolk, VP of Sales and Business Development at EasyAsk. “Explore will help us deliver the EasyAsk eCommerce search and merchandising solutions throughout the NetSuite user-base – both on-premise or as a service (SaaS). We are offering unique capabilities, including intuitive natural language search, relaxation, spell correction, integrated faceted navigation, easy to use merchandising tools and advanced analytics. EasyAsk and Explore Consulting are perfectly aligned in their vision to help Internet retailers achieve industry-leading conversion rates that dramatically increase e-commerce revenue.”

About Explore Consulting
Based in Bellevue, Wash., Explore Consulting was founded in 2001 and is a professional services company dedicated to providing innovative and cost-effective solutions for their customers’ database and IT systems needs. With a heavy focus on SaaS web-based business systems like NetSuite (NYSE: N) and Amazon Webstore, Explore has developed industry-leading PC and mobile platforms for seamless data integration in the Cloud. Additionally, Explore develops custom solutions ranging from eCommerce web stores that are fully integrated to back-office systems to highly specialized business applications written in Microsoft’s .Net and SQL platforms. Explore was recently ranked among Inc. Magazine’s fastest growing companies for four straight years as well as the Puget Sound Business Journal’s 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies three years running. Explore Consulting is the largest NetSuite Solution Provider and reseller in the Northwestern United States and was recently named as 2011 NetSuite Partner of the Year, Americas. For more information, visit www.exploreconsulting.com.

About EasyAsk
EasyAsk is radically changing the speed and ease of how people find information through the company’s ground-breaking natural language search software. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional search, allowing users to simply ask questions in plain English and receive highly tuned results on demand. The EasyAsk eCommerce Edition uses this unique technology to deliver industry-leading website search, navigation and merchandising solutions that boosts online revenue through increased conversion rates, better customer experience and agile merchandising. EasyAsk Quiri & Business Edition revolutionize enterprise decision-making, moving beyond traditional business intelligence solutions with easy, low-cost deployment and a unique natural language interface that extends access to information anywhere in the organization.

Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, EasyAsk has long been a leader in natural language information analysis and delivery software. Customers such as Coldwater Creek, Lands End, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, TruValue, Siemens, Hartford Hospital, Ceridian, JoAnn Fabrics and Harbor Freight Tools rely on the EasyAsk software products to run their business and e-commerce operations daily.

Ready to see how EasyAsk's eCommerce solution can help you? Request a demo!
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