Chris Hostetter presented this presentation at Apache Con 2006. Faceted searching with Solr. Its pretty good and well worth the read. Solr has some special caching mechanisms to deal with facetes. I know one of the first implementations of Solr at CNET was to support facted search. So you wouldn’t be wrong in saying Solr was built to do faceted search.
I discovered an open-source ETL tool Talend Who knew?
I remember having to write my own ETL tool, because my company didn’t want to pay for an extra license on a tool they already had (Informatica). I have had plenty of conversations with developers who had no idea what I was talking about when I asked if they considered an ETL tool for their crawler, transformer, loader thingy.
A solid opensource ETL tool, marks the end of software development and the beginning of component integration. Time to dust off you systems integrator hat.
So last Friday the folks at Offermatica invited me down for a visit. They were very nice, and I quickly discovered that my experiences with scaling were not right. The company I was working with had sent they traffic to Offermatica’s staging servers! Doh!
That Friday while I was there, ESPN started running some tests. The additional traffic wasn’t causing any problems. ESPN is the 5th largest entertainment site according to Netratings, so thats not too shabby.
The same day I was talking to a friend of mine who works at BabyCenter. He said Offermatica was working out great for them. Before any A/B/multivariate testing had to go through the development team, which meant placing more work on the development queue. With Offermatica, the integration is down via JavaScript as a web service.
Now that the development team isn’t involved, the business analysts can take direct control of the testing and get the most out of their site.
Yikes, 4th of July, Tour de France, and Wimbledon have conspired against my blogging. Mark from Offermatica posted a comment, which deserves a little more prominence. So I’ve posted it below.
Eric,
Thank you for appreciating the elegance of the Offermatica integration.
I’d like to clarify a few of your points that may be based on old information:
1. Offermatica is supporting clients that send over 100 Million requests a day.
2. Offermatica supports multiple conversion events across multiple pages and multiple user visits.
3. By default Offermatica uses first-party cookiesMark
(Offermatica Engineering Team)
Whats the takeaway from all of this?
Well first off I could be wrong. My first hand impressions and usage, may be different than others. I’m overwhelmingly positive about Offermatica, and I expect others would be as well, but my particular criticisms of the product may not be apparent to others.
Which bring me to my next point, these optimization tools are necessary and valuable. For that reason I recommend them where ever I go.
Finally, there should be a much bigger market for analytical tools. Everyday people vote with their clicks on what they like and what works for them. Its unfortunate that most of the debate bounces back and forth between those people who already understand the importance of good analytics.
So the same question remains where are all the other optimization and analytics software for web sites? Why do some business owners continue to believe that their intuition is better than gathering real data from frequent experiments.
So here is my challenge to business who develop software to support web-analytics. Please make amazing products, which provide easy to understand reports for the simplest of tests. As an industry please work together to create a body of standard metrics for testing different user experiences.
My challenge for business owners, please use the products listed on the blog. Make real projections for the products you launch, and use consistent measures in your business. Don’t be fooled by the recent tide of ad dollars, which has lifted all boats.
I was surprise to find people actually reading my blog. Especially a poorly written post on Offermatica’s dominance.
So here is another post on some basics tenets of running tests. The goal: provide users with a consistent view of the site while exposing different variants of the site to different people.
Within a session, a user must have the same experience. If you expose a users to two or more variants within a single session you will ruin the test. There will be no way of separating activity by variant. You may also create an unworkable navigation.
For example, lets say you decide to make a brighter background on some google ad words. If the users are split into two groups, you may simple compare the conversion rates of each group. In addition users will consistently see the same background and get the same “message”. If you randomly serve up different backgrounds, users will see ad words in two different presentations.
If a user sees both “messages” it can be very difficult to figure out which “message” should be credited with the conversion.
Remember all that hard work you put into optimizing your site for search engines? With some poorly planned multivariate testing it can all go down the drain.
Ya see, if search engines find more than one URL with almost the same content, that URL is viewed as a link farm and the page rank plummets. If your testing creates different URLs for different variants, try using robots.txt to block search engines from seeing your “experimental” pages.
The other problem is rapid changes. To the best of my knowledge, if the agents from a search engine see multiple version of the same page, they will only take one version. With each new version no one is sure what happens to the pages rank, it may go up it may go down. Sometimes these changes take 2-3 weeks to digest, and problems show up after testing is complete.
In this case filtering by user agent is a good idea. Send agents with “bot” in their UA string to a nice stable site. In addition, at this point search agents don’t look at java script. With DOM manipulation via java script your site is safe too.