Yet another CouponLooker update went live today. The most noticeable additions are recommended sub-queries for % off coupons and specific merchants. For the specific merchants it was necessary to add a mechanism to normalize the merchant names, since the coupon feeds we get sometimes list Dell as Dell.Com, Dell Home, Dell USA, or about 40 other variations.

The other bigger project was mostly not visible. We are experimenting with sponsored coupons, which would allow the provider of a coupon feed to pay us to get a higher listing for their coupon. This is tricky since our top priority is to maintain the quality of the results we give users- just because someone is paying doesn’t mean its ok to show some crap unrelated coupon. So the system is built around some fairly sophisticated scoring based on the initial score, click through rates (if a coupon is relevant, people will click it, if its less interesting it gets ignored) and more.

The system we use bears some resemblance to some of the similar stuff from Google. Its interesting observing the dynamic in discussing emulating Google’s approach to something. Google has been such an extreme success story that its a bit tempting to take an initial position that you can just emulate them as the path to sure riches.

Back in reality its important to break it down into two pieces. First of all, the amazing revenue that Google enjoys is not just a product of their technology, rather its supported by their technology. Emulating the technology doesn’t directly give you any revenue. You need a good business plan and model, and I’ll leave that to others (from my seat its in good hands at Judy’s Book).

On the technical side it doesn’t just work to copy either. Instead its important to really understand the “why” behind the mechanisms that work and understand how you can apply that same learning to your different problem. So for example, we use a system that supports bidding for ad placement. We measure click-through rates to adjust the value of the ads. But other items are very different- Google ads are separate from the content, whereas in CouponLooker, someone is sponsoring a specific coupon that is part of our existing content.

Adding the sponsored coupons also introduced some new technical issues to deal with. Until now the usage of the system needed little back and forth with the database. In effect the engine could load all the coupons, and then search them from there with little changes until new coupons are loaded. With the new system there are much more frequent changes that an advertiser can create by placing new ads, running out of their daily budget or other factors which can change the results over shorter time-frames. I feel like the in-memory approach to the search engine really paid off here since it gave me lots of flexibility to change the details of computing the results. If I had relied much more on pre-computed indicies and results it would have been much harder to make this stuff work.

Which isn’t to say that it won’t be possible to pre-computer stuff later, but just that if you do that before you really have the details of the system worked out, you will have set in stone mechanisms that are harder to adjust.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Launch21, Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.