Web analytics provider Omniture today launched Omniture SiteSearch, a hosted site search product it picked up in its Visual Sciences acquisition, which closed in January 2008.
The SiteSearch product was an early entry in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space. It was originally launched in 1999 as Atomz Search, part of its content management suite. Atomz was later acquired by analytics provider WebSideStory, which later acquired Visual Sciences. The entire company changed its name to Visual Sciences, and was then acquired by Omniture.
A few clients, including Verizon and BusinessWeek have been using SiteSearch as a standalone product, according to Jeff Minich, senior product marketing manager at Omniture. Today, it becomes an integrated part of the Omniture online marketing suite.
The biggest effect of this is the ability to impact site search results using data from Omniture’s SiteCatalyst analytics package. So on an e-commerce site, for example, a search for “shirts” could be made to return the most popular shirts of the season, or those that return the highest margin, or those that are converting highest, Minich said.
“You can set business rules to break ties, or to push a page higher in the results,” he said. “You can also combine metrics, and weight them relative to each other, and relative to the natural relevancy ranking in SiteSearch.”

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I just got back from speaking on a multivariate testing panel at eMetrics in San Francisco.
A conversation I had with Marshall Sponder triggered this post. Marshall was bemoaning the fact that web analysts can’t even get “a seat at the table” (i.e. serious consideration) within many companies. To me this was a statement of the obvious. There are three main reasons that web analysts are not taken seriously.
Trying to do too many complicated & custom things
Data mining and analysis is pretty open-ended. A smart person can think up many ways to slice and dice the data. The very word “analyst” conjures up images of complexity. This is “rocket science” and no amount of simplified Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on a customized dashboard for your boss will change that. If you dumb down the data too much then others may jump to the wrong conclusions. If you let them peek under the hood, then the complexity comes roaring back.
Looking in the rearview mirror
Analytics pores over data that was collected in the past. No matter how detailed or insightful it is, it can not necessarily be translated directly into actions because the conditions now may have changed significantly since the data was collected (e.g. traffic mix, seasonal factors, actions of competitors).

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Recently I helped break the news that Yahoo acquired IndexTools. IndexTools has long been one of the industry’s best kept secrets. It’s a really powerful web analytics application that allows you to do some amazing stuff. Now Dennis Mortensen has let me know that the IndexTools Enterprise Version will be free.
As Dennis puts it, 80% of the functionality of Omniture at no charge. Whoa baby! This is very exciting news for the industry. This move by Yahoo, which should not be a big surprise in light of what Google and Microsoft has already done, will rip the covers off IndexTools as an industry secret, and truly bring it into the limelight.
Look for a lot of people to closely evaulate IndexTools as their analytics solution from this point forward. And don’t think that it stops there. You just might see more announcements coming from IndexTools as their integration with Yahoo progresses.

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Earlier this week, CMS Watch said that Google Analytics and Omniture are “over-hyped.” This is a distant echo of the classic complaint by the Brits during World War II that the Yanks stationed in their country were “overpaid, oversexed and over here.”
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