Editorial:Helping Web customers help themselves
 
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If you did any online shopping over the holidays you probably encountered the bane of the e-commerce world - the inability to help surfers easily locate specific items.
Amazon.com, for example, sells tools. But try logging on and searching for "wood routers," handheld machines used to work on wood. The company's search engine returns five items - two books and three cutting bits that go in routers.
Now any tool merchant worth its salt will sell routers, so this is frustrating for me, the consumer, because I know Amazon is hiding them in there somewhere.
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And it should be frustrating for Amazon too, because of the five items its search engine returned four of them cost less than $20 and the fifth costs $45. Routers cost $200 to $300. Frustrated by Amazon's search results, I might bolt to one of the 50 other tool merchants on the Web.
Enter EasyAsk, Inc. This young company aims to help online merchants solve this thorny problem. Its solution: Replace the keyword-driven relevancy text searches used by most sites with a natural language search/query tool supported by automatically built (for the most part) dictionaries that reflect site-specific content. These are used to fine-tune each search before it is processed, limiting the number of results that float to the surface.
But the company's tool goes a step further - it searches multiple sources, both structured and unstructured. So besides scanning product descriptions, an EasyAsk search will scour category assignments and other attributes stored in relational databases.
Together these capabilities mean that if your customer types in "men's no-iron pants," but you have classified them as wrinkle-free, your Web site will be smart enough to recognize the phrase-level synonym.
EasyAsk founder and Chairman Larry Harris says his tool can even generate precise SQL queries for questions that include things such as "at most $100." That means visitors to your Web site could pose natural language questions like "hiking boots under $100" and get just that.
The tool looks pretty slick. Check out the demos at EasyAsk.com.
The one drawback is it is only available on Windows NT, while many Web sites are based on some flavor of Unix. The company is working on a Java-based version that is expected to go into beta testing in February.
- John Dix, Editor in chief
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