Holiday prep 2004: Wine.com refines Web search

This is the first in a series of stories about retailers bolstering their Web sites in time for holiday sales in 2004. Stay tuned for more.

A wine connoisseur has something specific in mind when searching for a “dead arm” vintage. But can a Web site's search engine understand the subtlety of that query?

Not all of them, says Francis Juliano, CIO at Wine.com. The San Francisco retailer tried a few different search engines before it selected Endeca's InFront search, navigation and merchandising software.

“It's not hard to find what you're looking for if you want a '96 Dom Perignon, but if you're looking for a d'Arenberg Dead Arm Shiraz, that's a different story,” Juliano says.

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This is the first in a series of stories about retailers bolstering their Web sites in time for holiday sales in 2004. Stay tuned for more.

A wine connoisseur has something specific in mind when searching for a “dead arm” vintage. But can a Web site's search engine understand the subtlety of that query?

Not all of them, says Francis Juliano, CIO at Wine.com. The San Francisco retailer tried a few different search engines before it selected Endeca's InFront search, navigation and merchandising software.

“It's not hard to find what you're looking for if you want a '96 Dom Perignon, but if you're looking for a d'Arenberg Dead Arm Shiraz, that's a different story,” Juliano says.

“Dead arm” refers to a condition when one half of a T-shaped grape vine is lost to disease, and all of the nutrients destined for the lost arm are routed to the remaining healthy arm, Juliano explains.

"Mother Nature is used to a split,” he says. “When one arm is gone, all of the nutrients get shoved down the remaining arm of the vine, which produces a very strong and flavorful wine. It's a rare condition."

With its old search tools, Wine.com would have spent "several man-weeks" programming the software to understand a query like that, Juliano says. With Endeca, it didn't have to do any custom coding for the software to process the query.

One of the main reasons Wine.com invested in the Endeca software was to deliver better results to shoppers looking for search assistance.

"We do a dominant portion of our business in the fourth quarter. The last thing we want is for people to do a search on our site and leave because they can't find what they're looking for," Juliano says. It's even worse if Wine.com has the product a shopper wants, but the search engine just couldn't interpret the query, he says.

To help refine Web searches, Endeca's platform supports what it calls "guided navigation." There are about 15 different attributes which the Endeca engine can use to distinguish Wine.com's 10,000-plus wines. Shoppers can search by brand, vintage, vineyard, rating, price, appellation and varietals, for example. By adding attributes to a search, a shopper can continually refine the search results.

Because not all visitors to the site are connoisseurs, the guided navigation part of Endeca's software helps customers narrow down the field of products and find an appropriate product, Juliano says. "Everybody that loves wine and drinks wine doesn't necessarily know how to describe wine."

Tolerance for misspellings is built into the platform. Endeca's software surmises a shopper searching for "merlo" probably had "merlot" in mind, for example. "Spelling Cabernet Sauvignon - that's not something we're all proficient in," Juliano says.

Additionally, the search platform can distinguish among different kinds of products. Wine.com doesn't just sell wine, it also sells gift baskets and other accessories. It was important to find a search engine that can distinguish between "chocolate" as a sweet treat and "chocolate" as a flavor in wine, Juliano says. "We don't have to custom-code a set of rules to deal with food types, versus books, versus wines. The engine handles all of that for us."