Rahul writes about our latest update to CouponLooker. This is our third and its one of the more exciting things to me how quick it is to update and tweak the search algorithm. There are some pretty sophisticated things going on inside the engine but things have been designed with an eye towards flexibility and rapid iteration. I’m sure the equivalent results could be done with an approach that uses half as many CPU cycles, but frankly CPU cycles are relatively cheap now and making rapid improvements are invaluable.

One detail that you won’t see using the service directly is that I’ve put in some A-B logic for our own development purposes. I can put the site into a special mode where whenever it does a search it does it twice using random different permutations of our algorithm. We can then experiment with this in the office or with test subjects and ask people to search for useful things and give the system feedback on which of the result-sets look more useful.

One of the interesting projects I’ve worked on recently is building the CouponLooker vertical search engine for Judy’s Book along with some of their in-house developers and designers. Vertical search is a recently popular category as people have realized that Google, while it does a great job for general content topics, often returns poor results when in various specific categories. Those categories are often marked by either structured data or else a commerce related reason why people have spammed the general search results (or ideally both). My own CalendarData.com site tackles one such vertical search category (public events) and CouponLooker aims at another one that is covered by both of the good criteria.

The scenario for CouponLooker is pretty simple. You are buying your favorite stuff somewhere on the Internet and are checking out when you see a textbox that looks like this-

Promo code? Coupon code? I dunno, is there a coupon for this vendor? Am I the chump who is paying full price while others are saving? But go search on Google and you will likely get lots of results that try to steer your purchase to other stores, that provide old expired info or just generic results that aren’t very useful at all.

The search site we build has 4 main components-

1) Data acquisition- pulling in coupon data, processing it and storing it.

2) The search engine- picking which coupons are the best matches for a user’s search.

3) The web-site itself

4) The blog widgets that let you host CouponLooker search on your own blog.

I’ll go into more details about the designs of these components in subsequent posts (but I’m not saying I’m going to cover them in any specific order).