Krugle Search Finds Code Finds Answers

Krugle.com was added to our collection of vertical search engines today. Krugle is based in Menlo Park, CA. Similar to Google CodeSearch, Krugle goes beyond just returning source code snippets as Google Code Search simply offers. Both sites are selected by us and are listed on Keeca Web section.

By comparison, Krugle stands out as the best vertical search for software developers and beats Google Code handily. Krugle stretches an extra mile to show you related tech pages and open source projects found on the web, which is a very useful featured demanded by software engineers. Simple and useful. The simple pulldown allows you to narrow down to a specific programming language. Search results are useful enough to provide sample code and related web sources to educate yourself.

Among the code search engines that we recommended, Krugle is the only one that is capable of giving me useful answers to specific needs. Let's say I'm looking for a Perl solution - a module or a direction of some sort - to be able to grab Web images from the Web and store them locally for later use. For this, on Krugle, I found what I was looking for by clicking on 'Project' tab, selecting 'Perl' in the language pulldown. In the search box, I typed in 'grab image'. I got:

GrabCartoonsBSD

GrabCartoons is a program for generating a "comics summary" page. You can use it to avoid having to manually visit multiple pages for comics you want to view. It is extendable, and easy to add modules for new comics.

Image ArcadiaLGPL

Image Arcadia is a Digital Asset Management server package. It runs on NT or *nix under Apache and Perl. Incorporates an extensible file type manager so that any type of file is supported. There is a strong plugin architecture that supports thumbnail

Internet Imaging BenchathlonArtistic

The Benchathlon is an international open initiative of researchers to build a common benchmark for content-based image retrieval systems

Image Display SystemGPL

A perl script that generates a photoalbum website (with thumbnails) on the fly. All you need to provide are the images. Uses HTML templates so you can customize the look of the site.

ImageBackup

'ImageBackup' is an automatic incremental backup system for digital pictures. It creates backup CDs, one at a time, until all images have been backed up. You run the program regularly; it will gather images until another disc is full. Once a disc is full, it can use AutoScrapbook to create Web-based index files, automatically generate an ISO image, and reset the staging area.

Image::Size

The Image::Size module for Perl lets you retreive image dimensions (and type, when unknown) from graphics files in a variety of common formats. It is a pure Perl extension requiring no C compilation or XS linking. It is meant to be used in CGI application development to allow run-time derivation of image sizes, so you don't have to hard code such data in applications or HTML templates.

QuikKopy Image CopierGPL

Command line utility which copies images from a source directory (e.g. mounted USB filesystem/digital camera) to a destination directory, creating a structured library of digital images. Provides batch resizing/manipulation of images using ImageMagick.

ImageSorter image browser/file managerGPL

ImageSorter is image browser/file manager for unix systems writen in perl/glade/gtk and uses imlib graphic library. It has many advanced features like multiple panes, viewing multiple images, regexp selections, drag-n-drop, finding duplicate files,...

EIGHT: Easy Image GalleryGPL

EIGHT: Easy Image Gallery is a perl CGI script to help automate the maintenence of a web based collection of images.

HTTP::GetImagesGPL

A CPAN perl module that allows one to recover and locally store images from the web, including those linked by anchor and image map.

Krugle returns super fast and is the best to give a specific direction to dig into, while other code search engines including Google Codesearch fails to demonstrate such a strength. Software developers used to take hours to search using generic search engines now only cost a couple minutes of time for the same task. Save time, save cost, save money. Use Krugle!

Free LocalCooling Software

Free software for Wiondows, LocalCooling is the latest pick added to Keeca Pack - our recommendation of software to you, totally free. LocalCooling let you optimize your PC energy savings in minutes and fight global warming from your desktop. The meter shows how much oil and trees you save, or your group save. If you're influential in your community to have this software installed, you'll be able to track how much your organization save the earth as a whole.

Find Lowest Price

I'm pleased to recommend you the Keeca Product, a product search feature which just joined our collection of services to provide price comparison on tangible goods. Occasionally, the newly added 'Find lowest price' link will appear next to the deal search result related to specific product listings, as in:

Free Shipping on IPod Nano - Apple Computer

New iPod nano from Apple: 2GB, 4GB and 8GB starting at $149. Free shipping and free engraving, only at the Apple Store. Offer good until 2006-12-30.
More Apple Computer deals - Find lowest price

Shoppers can't be too smart without price comparison. To find the lowest price of a product, use the product search on keeca.com.

Same Flights, Different Prices.

Booking flight online is easy, much easier than going through traditional travel agency. I used to call my travel agency to book flights. It turned out that for a couple times, I could give the agency hints or specific options that I found online with specific lower prices than they suggested for me. Pretty soon, I changed my shopping behavior to be in favor of online travel booking, rather than embarrassing traditional travel agency with better flights deals that I know of from the Web. That was around year 2004 and 2005.

Travel search is a big sector, too big of sales amount so it has to be excluded from e-commerce statistics for people who closely monitor 'traditional' e-commerce market. Flight booking, hotel reservation, vacation packages, etc., are aspects of online travel market. Getting bigger and bigger, and trickier.

Take flight as an example, assuming going from point A to point B, leaving on date one and come back on another date, I tried to pick a specific airline to compare prices. Unlike I compare prices of tangible goods online, travel package comparison is a bit different, but at least I figured to 'fix' all variables to focus on one round-trip flight to see if the prices are the same, or different, offered from the SAME airline but sold through different online travel sites.

The short answer is no. I didn't get the same price for the same flight booking of the same airline, same route. Prices differ from one online travel site to another (See the quotes extracted from my shopping basket below). One site would charge me for $1,477, another for $1,973. What gives?

You have to believe and know to try a couple more places for your flight tickets. The difference may be as big as $500 bulks as demonstrated here. Go to the right place to do your smart shopping decision.

Allow me to make 2 simple recommendations, try Keeca Travel and TravelLocation.

		United Airlines Flight # 831 Departure: San Francisco, San Francisco International Airport, USA 2006/12/01 1229 Arrival: Taipei, Chiang Kai Shek, Taiwan 2006/12/02 2110 United Airlines Flight # 830 Departure: Taipei, Chiang Kai Shek, Taiwan 2007/01/01 1010 Arrival: San Francisco, San Francisco International Airport, USA 2007/01/01 0806 All prices displayed in USD Adult 1 x 1235.00 Taxes 1 x 242.01 TOTAL 1477.01

San Francisco, CA (SFO) to Taipei, Taiwan (TPE) Friday, Dec 1 Flight info Dates Misc Fares United Airlines 831 Boeing 777 Dec 01 12:29 pm depart SFO Dec 02 9:10 pm arrive TPE stops: 1 Class: Coach Fare Basis Code: BLEX Booking Class: B Fare Rules Delete Taipei, Taiwan (TPE) to San Francisco, CA (SFO) Monday, Jan 1 Flight info Dates Misc Fares United Airlines 830 Boeing 777 Jan 01 10:10 am depart TPE Jan 01 8:06 am arrive SFO stops: 1 Class: Coach Fare Basis Code: BLEX Booking Class: B Fare Rules Delete Total Airfare (including taxes and charges): USD 1973.01 Penalty: Penalties may apply. Please see fare rules.

Pack of useful software Keeca recommends. Totally FREE!

Free and useful for personal use, our recommended collection of software include the famous Google Pack and beyond. We gathered what's hot on the Web and categorized them into 5 areas - Web, Music & Photo & Video, Communication, Office Suite, and Productivity. Some of them are purely Web-based web 2.0 applications facilitate you from surfing the Web to editing clips online. For example, YouSendIt let you send big files that are too large for emails; JumpCut, recently acquired by Yahoo, allow you make amazing movies online right in your browser and perform easy online video editing. Others are stand-along software application that you can download and install. For example, the iTune from Apple Computer works well on both PC and Mac. It is the best friend an iPod ever had, you use iTune to organize, share and listen to music on your computer.

Free. We insist only include completely free top-notch software in our Keeca Pack. Go try them out, but don't spend too much time. I warn you.

Deal Search Gets Faster

We had successfully upgraded our Deal Search infrastructure to use a newer search engine libraries - KinoSearch. Though KinoSearch is still in its alpha stage, but we had experienced its performance of building indices improved over 40 times than Plucene API in our own benchmark test, pretty much in line with official KinoSearch benchmarks. The move is good for user experiences and also improved system reliability for Plucene used to give us file descriptors leakage under mod_perl framework. Shoppers should experience deal results returned in a more timely manner as we continue to grow our deal database.

Study Buddy

Want you kids to find answers to more than 4000 frequently asked homework questions or use one of the many online reference tools? Use AOL's StudyBuddy.com, now covered by Keeca Web with a link to this useful, study-friendly sites.

Study Buddy categorizes references into top categories of math, health, language, science, social studies, and electives. Under each, you can further browse by grade, K to 12, which is an important to easily get to proper material of kids' age. Where Answers.com is a generic knowledge base for all ages, Study Buddy is especially suited for kids' learning. Also, for writing, use Essay Feedback to get your paper proofed before you turn it in for a grade. It's free, fast and easy.

Pluggd for Searching Podcasts

Until now, for months, Keeca Web had been recommending Yahoo Podcasts for searching available podcasts channels on the web. I stumbled upon Pluggd and tried. I like it over Yahoo Podcasts for 2 reasons:

1. Pluggd seems more compatible (or reliable) to play audio on my Mac. Unlike Yahoo Podcasts, where I often ran into problems of not be able to play audio for unknown reasons. Pluggd's play just works, almost every time I clicked.
2. The search term I use return more relevant podcasts channels and episodes, but this is just my personal subjective observations.

You can use Pluggd to discover, listen, and share. In the near future, one exciting feature Pluggd had demonstrated and will roll out is it's capability to allow you to search inside a podcast to find the portions of an audio or video podcast that interest you.

Pluggd has now taken the place of our recommended Podcasts search site as listed on Keeca Web.

Deal Search Result Page Rearranged

Keeca Deal Search result page had changed from 2-column presentation to a 3-columns format. The new format had gone live last night.


At the center of the page, matched deals are shown to catch shoppers eyes. On the left, price comparison sites - BizRate, PriceRunner, Shopping.com, Froogle - are listed to take shoppers directly to the pricing result pages and auto carry over the search term for shoppers. Also, the recommended store merchants are listed on the left where our engine suggest shoppers some highly relevant stores to shop from. In the parentheses, the numbers denote number of deals available offered by that store. On the right, sponsored links are clearly identified.

As a shopper, I'd browse the deals at the center and look for stores on the left to shop from. For searches upon product, the price-comparison links on the upper left really save my time to spot the best price from the most places on the Web. These changes are relatively new and untested, so please, leave comments about what you think. I'm listening.

What's Hot On Keeca Homepage?

The day CrazyEgg opened to the public I jumped in and tried. Basically, if you have a web site and want to see where on a page people click on, you simply deploy CrazyEgg tracking code on your site and see the clicks come. The stats of my first test came in days after enough real visits were captured. To my surprise, the center premium placement of the page got almost no click of interests, which lead to a keeca.com homepage redesign. Whatever visitors were not interested in the central premium placement beneath the search box was pushed down. In stead, 3 125x125 banners were put in to guide visitors. The 2nd test ran then.

The above image shows the Heat Map of the 2nd CrazyEgg test. You see, the general online deal search remains the most interested feature of the site as before, followed by the travel deal banner. On the left, travel also stands out among all different type of deals.

No Registration Required for Printing Grocery Coupons from Keeca

Hassle free, no registration required, print grocery coupons and redeem them in-stores no longer requires you to surrender your email address. Simply point and click, then redeem them in stores. Thanks to Glenn of our partner company to make this happen.

Printable Grocery Coupons from Keeca.com

Through a partnership with our friends in Mountain View, CA, keeca.com now offers printable grocery coupons available and printable right from your desktop. To date, the selections has reached 100 mark and hopefully continue to grow. I took a look today and here are some items for your references as to what these offers are:

• Save $1.00 on Two Boxes Cheerios Cereal
• Save $1.00 on Two any Flavor Yoplait Nouriche
• Rent One Get One Free Hollywood Video DVD, VHS New Releases
• $1.00 Off Odwalla 15.2 oz PomaGrand
• more ...
  

I selected 4 items with simple clicks to check up the ones I want, paged through offers until I was done, clicked on print button. In a minute, the coupons were printed on paper and ready to travel with me to any grocery store on street that takes manufacture coupons. Did I forget to remind you to turn the printer on when printing?

To print grocery coupons from keeca.com, you may need to register with a valid email address where future printable coupons updates can be sent to. We hope to eliminate this registration requirement in the near future because we understand any hurdle stands between your browser and printed coupons should be removed. Also, you must use either IE or Safari for the printing interface compatibility's sake. It may sounds a bit discouraging to FireFox users on Macs like me, but I manage to get around this by shooting up a Safari browser that comes with any Apple computer.

Try it out and leave us comments. Tell up what you like and what not.

For other non-grocery printable coupons, there a tip for you. On keeca.com, use the special secret search term of 'PrintableDeal' and see what you get.

Keeca Extended Search

Today we added a extended deal search capability to keeca.com so shoppers can search for all deals indexed on the Web, beyond the scope of deals discovered by our shopping specialist only.

The extended deal search concept is essentially a vertical search, in the domain of discount shopping online. Our Extended Search is configured to list Keeca listings with priority and back fill listings of other sites from the Web. The scope is much more bigger but not as cleaned and organized as in the standard Keeca Deal Search. Yet, another weakness of the extended search is that the freshness of the information in the search result may not be as up to date as shopper expects.

Extended Deal Search results are 'community powered', meaning you, as a shopper and user, can mark your opinion as to whether the result listing should be promoted or demoted based on your opinion. Once such opinion is collected from you on the Web, our moderator will review your inputs and make the result better for the next user.

The new Keeca Extended Deal Search is powered by eurekster.

Keeca Insurance

Keeca strives to be a place for you to find online bargains and every thing else, which includes insurance. To get you FREE quotes in a timely manner, we had teamed up with InsureMe to offer Keeca Insurance accessible right from Keeca homepage. Keeca Insurance gives free quotes in the following categories - auto, home, health, life and long term care. Try for yourself, go to Keeca homepage and click on 'Insurance' link. If you're searching for quick, easy, affordable insurance quotes, your search is over! With one simple application, Keeca Insurance will get you up to five free insurance quotes from top-notch insurance companies. All you need to do is compare coverage and pick which policy is the best for you.

Keeca Donates Banner Space to March of Dimes

If we can make something positive, though minor, back to the society, we should do it. One way of doing so is to give out banner space to promote non-profit organization like March of Dimes. We are committed to donate Keeca Web upper-right banner space for this purpose. You can be part of this by making a donation through "Be a Hero for Babies Day" and supporting March of Dimes vital research, education, community services, and advocacy programs to get babies back where they belong – healthy and strong.

YouTube Added to Keeca Web

As Google continue to ramp up Google Video and offer select FREE premium video on a daily basis, YouTube.com has a longer tracking record and wider established audience base. At least for now. From consumer standpoints, I think this is a great a great source in video vertical to be added to Keeca Web collection. I recommended you to take a look at the video content contributed by the public. It's quite entertaining.

According to YouTube, at YouTube, you can:

Watch	Instantly find and watch millions of fast streaming videos.
Upload	Quickly upload and tag videos in almost any video format.
Share	Easily share your videos with family, friends, or co-workers.

You can find YouTube link added to Keeca Web and access from there next time you comeback.

Keeca.com Moved into New Data Center

Days ago, on 2006/6/9 early Friday morning, keeca.com was moved into a new data center. Our site is now on a brand new server in a more secure colocation environment that requires palm print recognition to get in. In the same building where keeca.com is hosted, I gladly found it is also the home to SimplyHired, one of our selected job search Vortal listed on Keeca Web. The transition had been in our plan for almost a quarter. We finally pulled the trigger and successfully switched! Sites are up, business as usual. Glitches here and there, but over all, we are in good shape and serving Web pages faster!

SWiK Added to Keeca Web

Keeca Web is a collection of good vertical portals that we recognized over time. For software professionals, rather than using a generic Web search, a specialized open source database is quite helpful and handy to find what project to use and/or technology to delve into to build your software applications. Today, Keeca identified SWiK, the free database of open source projects, and added it to Keeca Web collection.

According to SWiK:

SWiK is a wiki designed to drive community involvement and organize a lot of information.

SWiK.net is a community resource devoted to open source software. If you want to use open source software, SWiK’s mission in life is to make things easier for you by revealing how to use the software you have, or letting you know what projects you should be using.

SafeSearch and Site-Flavored Activated for Keeca Web Search

Keeca Web Search is powered by Google, the most influential search engine in the world. So ... what's the difference between searching on google.com and you type a search term, and click on Web search on keeca.com?

First, SafeSearch is on at Keeca Web Search.

With SafeSearch, sites and web pages containing adult themed and explicit sexual content are excluded from Keeca web search results. Keeca prefer not to have adult sites included in our search results. According to Google:

Google's SafeSearch screens for sites that contain pornography and explicit sexual content and eliminates them from search results. While no filter is 100% accurate, Google's filter uses advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases, URLs and Open Directory categories.

Second, Site-Flavored is turned ON.

Site-flavored search is a new feature from Google that lets us customize Keeca Web search results to be more relevant for discount shoppers. Since we have site-flavored search turned on, Google's learning technology will flavor your search results to be more customized to Keeca's themes and topics.

For example, Keeca is a site about finding online bargains and everything else, site-flavored search may over time begin to understand our topic and influence your Web search results to be more bargain-relevant. However, according to Google, the learning technology used in site-flavored search takes time. You won't notice any changes overnight, but gradually your search results should become more relevant.

The Power of Targeting

"Turbo Jam" came up as one of the top deal search terms earlier this month. It turned out to be a fitness program of workout combining calorie-blasting kickboxing, body sculpting, and the hottest dance music. I observed from our system log that visitors came in searching for "turbo jam" but the must be disappointed because no results turned up. This is before.



After some research to dig out a "Turbo Jam" deal offered by our affiliated Beach Body merchant, an offer was added to our bargain selections. This is after.

Stats reveal that amont 137 impressions, 4 out of 5 click-thoughs ended up with a sale. This is the power of targeting deal search.

4/2/2006 - 4/5/2006

Transaction Date	Merchant Name	SKU#	Product Name	Quantity
Sunday 02-APR-2006 17:38	Beachbody (Product Partners, LLC) www.beachbody.com	TJDVDK10-B	Turbo Jam package + FREE upgrade to Express Delivery in Continental U.S. -- normally an additional $15.00 (3 payments of $19.95)	1
Monday 03-APR-2006 22:40	Beachbody (Product Partners, LLC) www.beachbody.com	TJDVDK10-B	Turbo Jam package + FREE upgrade to Express Delivery in Continental U.S. -- normally an additional $15.00 (3 payments of $19.95)	1
Tuesday 04-APR-2006 02:41	Beachbody (Product Partners, LLC) www.beachbody.com	TJDVDK25-1U	Turbo Jam Maximum Results package (1 payment)	1
Wednesday 05-APR-2006 03:26	Beachbody (Product Partners, LLC) www.beachbody.com	TJDVDK10-B1U	Turbo Jam package + FREE upgrade to Express Delivery in Continental U.S. -- normally an additional $15.00 (1 payment)	1
Wednesday 05-APR-2006 03:26	Beachbody (Product Partners, LLC) www.beachbody.com	TJDVDK26-B1U	Turbo Jam Maximum Results package (1 payment)	1
Report Totals:	5	***	***	5

Breakdown by All Link type Email Product Text Banner Search Box Store Front Other Html Active Display Link Builder Dynamic Rich Media Merchandiser Manual/Unassigned
Merchant Name	Impressions	Click-Throughs	C/I(%)	# of Orders	# of Items
Beachbody (Product Partners, LLC) www.beachbody.com	137	5	3.65%	4	5
Report Totals:	137	5	3.65%	4	5

Blogosphere Search

The Pew Internet study of 2004 estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. What is a Blog? Blog stands for Weblog which is a Web site that contains dated entries in reverse chronological order about a particular topic on which most recent posted entry displayed first. As Technorati puts it:

The power of weblogs is that they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them. Blogs are a fluid, dynamic medium, more akin to a 'conversation' than to a library

Every day, new Blog sites are being created, conversations are being posted onto these new and existing Blogs - thoughts, ideas, news, conversations, discussions, comments, etc. The universe of Blog is called blogosphere. Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on within this blogosphere which continue to grow at a quickening pace as of early 2006.

Keeca selects Technorati as our preferred search engine in the Blogosphere domain. Particularly, Technorati's 'Watchlist' let you predefine keyword(s) of your interests, so you can easily access your watchlists and see the conversations related to the topics you set up. Another useful tool is the authority bar on every blog search result page. You can simply adjust the authority bar to filter out Blog sites with less authority.

To try the Blog Search engine selected by Keeca.com, go to Keeca Web, click on the Blogosphere link under Editor's Choice on the left.

Web Calendar

For years, rumors have been Google is working on a Web calendar application. Days ago, google released Google Calendar. I once fell asleep while waiting for Google to come up with its calendar app, I turned to BackPack of 37Signals, an web application that supports group collaboration on writing documentation quite well. BackPack also comes with a reminder feature which I have been using it as my simple calendar. I had put numerous reminders into my BackPack that remind me to do things when the times come. So far so good. I particular like the way I can set a reminder in a fuzzy way - set up a coming event to happen 'in a couple days', or 'in a week', thus I don't have to be precise on every to-do when setting it. Google Calendar, on the other hand, may require to be precise in date when setting up a future event. However, you can set up an event quickly by specifying a date, say '5/1,' using the 'Quick Add', and Google Calendar is smart enough to finish setting the event for you quickly.

No doubt, on the first peep, Google Calendar can share multiple calendars and alert you though cell phone, which are much more powerful. In the near future, I might have to switch to Google because I manage multiple calendars in real life. For now, it has been added to Keeca Web collection.

Random Deals of the Minute

Random Deal of the Minute made its debut on Keeca.com homepage last year November. Until today, it showed one dynamic 'qualified' deal a time and changed every minute.

Speaking of dynamic ... If you had experience using Amazon's Gold Box, it is a little treasure box that you can access on the upper right of Amazon.com. What's in the box are product deals that vary every day, and you have only one chance of viewing what are inside the box that day. They are more than one, or precisely, ten product deals in the gold box each day personalized to your taste. I had never bought a single item from the box yet, but browsing through is interesting.



Back to Keeca's random deal, in stead of just one random deal, 'Random Deal of the Minute' has become 'Random Deals of the Minute.' Now three random deals are displayed in stead of just one on keeca.com homepage. This change should fill a stylish 20" Apple Cinema Display better.

Rejected by Blog Explosion

Yesterday, I tried to join the "fastest growing Blog community" at Blog Explosion but received a brief email this morning which turned my Blog down:

Your blog was declined for the following reason:
Nothing but links to keeca -- Sorry we do not accept these types of blogs

mmm .... not quite what I was expecting but being turned down is part of life and I am a bit disappointed. The response was brief and I got it only after one day after my application was turned in. They must be doing a great job of reviewing Blogs and get back to bloggers quick.

At any rate, my curiousity toward this Blog community can only be fulfilled if my blog can be approved. For those of you out there blogging, you may want to give it a try and let more people read your Blog.

In retrospect, Keeca.com Blog was created similar to de.licio.us has a de.licio.us blog dedicated to talk about things related to a specific Web site. Among this type of Blogs, Google Blog is another good one with Googler insights into product and technology news and Google culture. I'll sure try again and see what the folks at Blog Explosion think to have my Blog in.

Shopping Tips

In addition a page to cover some basic deal-search questions that I put up the other day, I just finished up two writings on shopping tips: Buy a Mac & Ways to Save Money Online. For each, I broke up tips within the topic and explained each tip a bit with a paragraph or two. These tips are what I as a consumer would consider helpful and practical. Take a look at these shopping tips and drop a comment to this post. I sure can use your tip too to touch them up and/or write more tips based on your inputs.

For other money saving tips, forums at SavingAdvice managed by Jeffery Strain and Nate Sanden also worth your visit. The collection of their Personal Finance Blogs give insights to others' daily money saving life.

Hint and Examples of Search Terms to Find Deals

At the end of earlier post of 'First Impression on a Site', I walked away by saying works ahead for me to do to improve users' impression. Since then, as a person who follows up, I have been pondering how do I not making visitors come to keeca and scratch their heads saying 'What the hack is this site for?' I may have to choose to pay for an professional that does Web site assessment to give me some pratical advices. For a little more than a hundreds bucks, it might worth the money, but I'll save it for later. Before then, I decided to DIY and learn from your feedback.

To recall, the comments I got for keeca Deal Search were:

"I don't know what to type for search."
"I am not sure what your site can return."
"How is your site different from Google?"

Thus, on the Deal Search homepage, I made two changes around the deal search box:

First, I added a hint of 'Show savings on:' before the search box. I hope this to give stronger indication to visitors that they can type in terms that they are looking for discounts.

Secondly, I also added examples of what visitors can type as search terms below the search box. For this, I chose "clothes", "old navy", "prada" and "ipod" representing category, store name, brand, and product.

Show savings on:

Deals[?] Web Travel Classifieds Events E.g. "clothes" or "old navy" or "prada" or "ipod"

While you're here, why don't you leave comments about your first impression of seeing Keeca Deal? I sure will follow up.

The Price of Going Cheap

Time is precious.

I had an iBook that I use it for my work everyday. Weeks ago, my 9 years old son accidently tipped my morning coffee onto the keyboard. I quickly shut the iBook down and wiped out the liquid on top. When I turned my Mac back, the keyboard wouldn't work properly. I had tried to dry it with a hair dryer. It didn't work. I dismounted the keyboard and washed it and dried it for 5 days, booted iBook back up ... sigh ... it still didn't work. The tips on the Web worked for others didn't help me. I gave up then, and search online for the keyboard part made for my iBook 12" G4 model.

The power of price comparison as one of many ways to save money online didn't give me much information about this particular computer part. I had to rely on a Web search to give me pricing information from very limited online merchants. The prices online for an iBook keyboard ranges from $54 (before tax and shipping) to about more than $120 a piece. The difference is so big that I couldn't resist to go with the one that offered the lowest price.

37 days later, I had not received my order. I am paying the price of time as a result of such buying decision.

My conversion with the merchant in the chronical order:

Day 1, 2/21: Order placed on MacSupportStore.

Day 5, 2/25: Status inquiry sent.

Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2006 2:26 PM
To: macsupportstore@mac.com
Subject: Order Status

Could you give me a status on my order #1140505767? Is it shipped?

Day 6, 2/26: Merchant replied saying delay.

Apple and The Mac Support Store are experiencing delays due to heavy order volume, and cannot estimate when your order will ship out. Rest assured we will ship your order within 24 hours of The Mac Support Store receiving it from Apple.

You have the option of continuing to wait for this order to ship out, or you can cancel your order.

Day 8, 2/28: I responded I’d wait.

Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:32:30 -0800 (PST)
Subject: RE: Order Status
To: jeff@macsupportstore.com
Hi Jeff, I'll have to wait then. Thanks.

Day 24, 3/16: Status follow-up.

Date: Mar 16, 2006 2:51 PM
Subject: Re: Order Status

It's been another 2 weeks and my order status is still 'pending' and not shipped. No words from Mac Support Store thus I'm writing to check on the status again after these days.

Please let me know if I I need strech my patience a bit and I'll do so accordingly. Some words are better than none. Thanks!

Day 25, 3/17: Merchant said to process in a week.

Date: Mar 17, 2006 9:46 AM
Subject: RE: Order Status

We’re confident that orders will begin again no later than the middle/end of next week. Thanks again for your patience.

Day 34, 3/26: Status follow-up with complaint.

Date: Mar 26, 2006 12:01 PM
Subject: Re: Order Status

Another week passed by and my order status is still pending, not being processed as promised.

Please accept this formal complaint to MacSupportStore, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Day 36, 3/28: Merchant said the order is ‘moving ahead’ and ‘will’ be filled.

Subject: Parts ordering is back online
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 18:53:01 -0500

I’m glad to announce that your parts orders are now moving ahead and will be filled in the order we first received them.

Again, I appreciate your patience during these last few months.

Day 37, 3/29: Merchant said my order has been ‘authorized’, and will be processed. Still not shipped.

Subject: Your order at The Mac Support Store! (Order #:1140505767)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:28:37 -0800

1140505767has been authorized, and will be processed.

The Mac Support Store

Please ship my order. I won't go this cheap next time.

Site Tagline

I was told the first impression of my site can be improved. I searched and found an article about site tagline of which the checklists of engaging first-time visitors echo a new tagline suggested by our marketing person. After going though a list of candidates, at last, we decided to go with,

"Find online bargains and everything else."

Though it might not be as clever as I wanted it to be, it is clear. As usability guru Jaco Nielson said,

"The key job of the tagline for a website is to set the stage for enabling the user to interpret the choices and content that's offered on the site. In the usability lingo, the tagline should help establish the user's conceptual model. If the tagline is not clear, it may give people the wrong model and thus cause them to make errors or simply abandon the site altogether."

Our new tagline is on the site starting today. We'll see how it conveys and whether it's clear from your perspectives. Please comment and let me know.

Deal Search Questions

Online coupons are still not heard of by many shoppers. I took it for granted that online shoppers know means to save because I am able to find coupon codes to apply online to pay less, or I can go through some rare special coded links to get better price than other buyers. I can also access outlet or clearance promotions. However, other shoppers online might not be as familiar with what Keeca can offer. I should tell briefly why use Keeca and how it is different from Google.

As a starting point, I quickly collect several questions about our search and list them. Then I went though and briefly answered them one by one at Help Center. I hope they help to clear things up a bit more. The questions are far from complete and would like to be informative. You can leave me a question by commenting on this post, or simply fill out the feedback form and I'll try to have your question covered.

First Impression on a Site

I was in a phone with a friend who's working on a startup. My take-away was that the first impression on a site is critical to new visitors. Returning visitors tend to know where to click to find things around, but new visitors are like 'tell me what I can do here in 3 seconds' or they will talk away if the point is not made immediately.

I approached my sister who's visiting me from abroad and had not seen keeca.com for quite some time, I assumed. I asked her to just look at Keeca homepage and tell me what she perceived. She said,

"I don't know what to type for search."
"I am not sure what your site can return."
"How is your site different from Google?"

From engineering standpoints, adding on feature is probably the best approach to ease self comfort based on a blind belief to have features, features, and features. I'd say in addition to build site features, features must be useful solving users' problem, and perceived by users.

The importance of the first impression perceived by visitors is critical. When I look at HerCoupon for only a couple seconds, I can easily guess the site is for women and is for discount shopping. To build that instant understanding for Keeca homepage, I have works to do.

Google Finance bumped Yahoo Finance

Today, I added Google Finance to Keeca Web and bumped Yahoo Finance to make Google Finance the default Editor's Choice for stock research.

After all these years of Yahoo Finance dominating as the best finance portal for generic public in terms of public usage, Google released its Finance section at Google Finance that I feel special.

First, I found the interactive charting capability of Google Finance labeled with news event in time line quite informative for the reader to learn what happened when for the ticker being looked upon.

Secondly, the new Google Finance page implicitly personalize your interests by 'remembering' what tickers you had searched before and aggregate news for those tickers for you on the Google Finance page. Try a couple of ticker searches and you should see the personalization I am talking about.

Then there are other advantages over Yahoo Finance are better integration with related Blog postings, and genereously give the outbout links to other informative finance web sites including Yahoo Finance.

One more thing I like it for simple minded person who just want to get quick access to a company's financial statements, the income statement and balance sheet summary are right on the page dedicated to a ticker company.

Keep
Keck
KC
Kc
Kerk
Edit...
Ignore all
Add to dictionary

outbound
outbid
outboard
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Revert to "outboud"

Keeca Web Redesigned with Editor's Choices

To enable consumers search on the web for every thing other than online bargains, Keeca selects Google to power the Web search from Keeca Web. The Google Web search is ultra fast and relatively accurate than other generic search engine results. One can perform one search after another, scan through result listings for specific information. However, it is time consuming in many cases when you know what you want to search upon falls in a vertical domain, but just can't get the quality answers from a generic search engine.

The problem is time consuming, or put it other way considering the scenario, is that one can not find a quality site to continue down the searching path in a specific domain. Say you want to look for your local weather, maybe you don't know any quality weather site that can give you weather forcast of your city, so you need to perform a generic Web search to locate a weather site first, so you type in 'weather forecast' as the Web search term. You should find a weather site using 'weather forcast' search term, then from there, you search for the local weather by zip code or city name, depend on the search feature offered by the weather site you found. Or, if you want to search for a movie showtime around your area, you need to find out a quality site that have movie showtime information, so you probably type in 'movie showtime' as the search term to locate a site, before you can perform additional search to look for the showtime. Or, you want to search for a stock ticker and corresponding nformation for stock research and you don't have a clue where to begin with. Or, not sure a great news source to read or search the news .... Besides shopping online, we do a lot of stuff in daily life and rely on search in vertical domains more and more. Since the problem of this is time consuming, we need to provide a collection of quality vertical search engines or vertical portal (Vortal) to help our visitors. Thus, a new Keeca Web where you can search for every thing else in addition to online bargains is formed.

In addition to the existing Web search powered by Google, Keeca Web tries to bring a quick and easy partial solution to the table by presenting a collection of preselected vertical search engines, broken up into several main categories. Under each category from general information to shopping, to digital media search, I picked and list the best one I had experiences with and recommend it to you. The list is far from complete and is subjective. I do listen to your voice and welcome suggestions. If you know a good site that does particular type of searches and does it very well, please ... please ... tell me and I'll evaluate it for inclusion. The site that helps your daily life may help others too, and the people work hard behind the scene well deserve a link to their site from Keeca.

Seasonal Themes of Promotions

In addition to presenting 'Most Popular' deal search terms (see my previous post), I was thinking about what else may be useful to give consumers more hints for deal and/or online coupon searching. With minimum efforts, I started to maintain seasonal themes at the upper left of Keeca Deal. Here's a snapshot:

Seasonal Deals

- March Madness (NCAA)
- TurboTax/TaxCut
- Easter

These themes will be updated according to a marketing themes of the season. Depend on how long the season last, some will stay for days, some for weeks. Rest assured they will be up-to-date.

What Deal Search Terms are Popular?

If you'd like to know top shopping search terms being price compared recently, shopping.com has been maintaining what they call it Consumer Demand Index.

The Shopping.com Consumer Demand Index (CDI) makes it easy for you to put your finger on the pulse of consumer demand. With millions of shopping searches conducted each week, the CDI reveals emerging trends and hidden gems while highlighting the hottest products.

-- shopping.com

similarly, I wonder what shopping are searching for deals on Keeca. It make sense for the CDI being product focused because when it comes to price comparison, I won't be surprised to see top search terms are physical products that can be price compared. I also want to know whether our deal searchers are looking for things that we here at keeca.com do a great job of serving up deals for what they are looking for. For this, keeca.com added 'Most Popular' on to Keeca Deal. The 'Most Popular' reveals popular terms being searched upon recently. To make it more statistically significant, I chose to do it for past 7 days (rather than just 1 day) as it is clarified on the left of the page on Keeca Deal. It covers deal search terms only for now, not to be confused by Web search terms. The number of times a deal search term was searched are counted at the unique visitor level, meaning if someone happens to search the same term more than once in a day, the counter for that particular deal search term will only be increased and counted for one. Here's an example of what the 'Most Popular' look like:

Popular Deal Searches

1. turbo tax
2. turbotax
3. six flags
4. newegg
5. sea world
6. southwest
7. southwest airlines
8. virgin mobile
9. western union
10. eharmony
11. turbotax online
12. aaa
13. fandango
14. imac
15. pottery barn
16. snagit
17. best western
18. busch gardens
19. compusa
20. hilton

The 'Most Popular' deal search terms is refreshed every day, many times. Like myself, a consumer may come to Keeca Deal to get a sense of what else are being looked for by simply scanning though the list. I noticed it changes slightly every day. It fulfills my curiosity to some extend from consumer standpoint. As our traffic level grows (I hope), the stats will make more statistic sense.

The real use of this list can also be used to improve deal content we collect. Ideally, I'd love to see every key phrase in the top 20 list takes consumers to a bag full of quality deals of that topic. Our Content Dept should use this list to go through from the top and chase down the list, fill them up, and consumers will be satisfied, at least more satisfied than before.

About Keeca, about Us.

There was no information about keeca.com until now I put up an 'About Us' section at the footer of every page. We are shy, but we still want to share with you about out mission and where to go from here toward our mission. We are no where near our ultimate goal of helping every consumer shop smart online as we're discovering more ways to perform smart shopping every week.

+ About Us
- Overview
+Services
- for consumers
- for merchants
- for publishers
- Blog
- Partners
- Press Releases
- Contact Us

We want you to know us better so you are comfortable using keeca.com.