[Sigia-l] RE: Faceted search and browser vendors

Tue May 24 05:40:13 EDT 2005

> Simon Parker asked:
> > Can anyone recommend vendors that offer facetted search and browse
> > capabilities, along with CV maintenance and the ability to tag data?

>Amy Silvers asked:
> Kathryn, if you have any info on proving increased ROI through faceted
> search (or tips on where to find such info) that you'd be willing to
> share, I'd be very grateful.

Simon and Amy and others, 

With apologies for the delayed response - I'm out of town and am just
catching up with the list. 

For my dissertation research the focus has been on current practice -
looking at website design and talking to a cross section of practitioners
and vendors. From personal experience, discussions of usability of or
evidence of increased ROI through faceted search tends to be anecdotal, or
located on vendor sites in the form of case studies as with the Endeca
case studies already mentioned. (Contacting individual vendors is one way
to access this material but is time consuming). 

The 2005 IA Summit contained several useful presentations like Steve
Mulder's - which included a case study of an Endeca deployment  by PC
Connection and another which involved a study of SoftChoice.com - Joanna
Briggs, Building on User Testing and I think Fred Leise did too (there
were others in addition to these). Check the program list from the past
few conferences for these. My recollection of ROI discussions in these is
not solid (I'm away from my notes).  

There are also some empirical studies of non-commercial products like
Flamenco and Marti Hearst's work is a great place to start - you might try
conducting a search to see who is citing this work (something you can do
relatively effectively using Google Scholar - or through one of the
commerical database vendors like ISI's Web of Science). See: Marti Hearst,
Ame Elliott, Jennifer English, Rashmi Sinha, Kirsten Swearingen, Ka-Ping
Yee. Finding the flow in web site search
Communications of the ACM, Volume 45, Number 9 (2002). Available:
http://bailando.sims.berkeley.edu/papers/cacm02-final.html	

Other such work is GEM (Gateway to Educational Materials) which uses
Siderean's Seamark see evaluation studies (of GEM) here:
http://www.geminfo.org/Evaluation/index.html.

This sort of data is something I will be especially interested in
collecting in the next phase of my research(post-dissertation - starting
in the Fall). Many of the people I have recently interviewed indicate that
the time for usability testing of faceted deployments is now, especially
in the context of A to B site comparisons - but that this sort of testing
is expensive and time consuming. Extracts of the data from interviews and
websites will be available once the dissertation is complete here:
http://mypage.iu.edu/~klabarre/facetstudy.html 

I too would be interested in hearing from anyone with data like this that
is not subject to proprietary restrictions (for I'm finding that there is
a great deal of this kind of material). 

A few pointers:

Back in September, 2004 Jupiter Research released a report "Retail Site
Search: Site Ranking and Best Practices"
http://www.jupiterdirect.com/bin/report.pl/95677/995
This is not free (cost $195), but summaries of this report are widely
available and this quote may be useful: , "Enhanced navigation capability
through faceted search or dynamically generated attributes allows
searchers to narrow the list of products via features that are important
to them and makes the experience more efficient and personally relevant.
Proactive merchandising efforts like calling out hot items and
best-sellers on the site page, as well as within the product listings,
allow merchandisers to drive purchase of particular products and improve
gross margin."

Other work that may be useful (in a list that is woefully incomplete -
I've got a number of .pdfs of scholarly articles I am currently wading
through - and I haven't started with the industry material yet):

Irina Ceaparu, Ben Shneiderman. Finding governmental statistical data on
the Web: A study of categorically organized links for the FedStats topics
page. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology Volume 55, Issue 11 , Pages 1008 - 1015. (2004).

J Teevan, C Alvarado, MS Ackerman, DR Karger - The Perfect Search Engine
Is Not Enough: A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing
systems. Vienna, Austria 
Pages: 415 - 422. (2004). 
available: http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/papers/chi2004-perfectse.pdf

S Dumais, E Cutrell, JJ Cadiz, G Jancke, R Sarin,  - Stuff I've seen: a
system for personal information retrieval and re-use. Proceedings of the
26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development
in informaion retrieval table of contents
Toronto, Canada SESSION: Human interaction.
Pages: 72 - 79  (2003) 
available:
http://research.microsoft.com/~sdumais/SISCore-SIGIR2003-Final.pdf 

Good luck!

	Kathryn La Barre	http://mypage.iu.edu/~klabarre
	doctoral candidate in Information Science 
	Indiana University~