Envato Notes

Improving Search on the Envato Marketplaces: 2013 in Review

Posted: 23 Dec 2013 12:00 AM PST

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Earlier this year, Michelle Robinson joined the Envato Marketplaces as Product Manager for Search. She reflects on a few of the things her team have been up to in 2013, and improvements the community can look forward to.

Michelle’s 2013 search wrap up:

Before I started at Envato, search related features, bugs and improvements were handled by the various other development streams in the Marketplaces until about April this year when a dedicated team was formed – yay!

It’s been an intense yet enjoyable 5 months of focus from myself and the team to initially develop an understanding of the unique culture of the Envato community, develop our strategic roadmap that both fits within the community's search needs and subsequently build and ship our initial features.

It's been a lot of fun working with such an amazing and dedicated team and we've shipped some great stuff in the relatively short amount of time we have been together.

Our year in a nutshell…

Jan – April was all about establishing a dedicated team researching and planning the new search platform (powered by Elasticsearch)

April – Oct was all about getting the team together (Michelle, Sean and Cath joined the team) and building/testing the new platform

Oct – December was all about shipping. In this period we:

Using A/B testing methods and our bespoke monitoring tools, we carefully rolled out the new platform to all sites
Launched comments search and author dashboard for comments search
Deployed author search and other possible searches

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Oct – Dec was also about people.

On the UX/ Design side of things – Cath switched teams and we gained Damir We were also lucky enough to have a student, Kevin with us as part of the RMIT summer studentship program.

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The Platform took up so much of our time – what's the deal with it?

Glad you asked – here's your answer from one of our senior devs Glen…

“Search has been identified for a long time as an area needing a lot of attention. Over the years, as the Envato Marketplaces grew rapidly, search had ended up fragmented. There were actually three different search systems in use. This made maintaining the existing system and adding new features very difficult. Something had to give.

So what do you do when you have three different pieces of search technology driving your site? You add a fourth! While doing a complete rewrite was going to mean some further delays in rolling out new functionality we decided that it had to be done.

While developing the system the old one still had to remain fully functional. Since changing search has a potentially big impact on our authors and buyers we also wanted to be able to roll out to subsets of our users and measure the impact our changes were having, to make sure it was going to be positive.

Thankfully that work is mostly behind us now and we’ve been able to start focusing completely on improving the search experience. Our Community is clamouring for more improvements and we’re finally in a good position to deliver them. Expect more great changes in the new year.

We had a few goals in mind when we developed the new search platform. We wanted to:

Minimize downtime
Eliminate single points of failure
Be able to scale our capacity horizontally (ie, add more boxes)
Simplify the codebase.

So far we’re satisfied the new platform meets these goals.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the community for being patient with us while we’ve been rolling these changes out.”

So how does new search measure up?

New search outperformed old search on key metrics, such as conversion rates and revenue per order. New search converted from 1% to 25% better than old search across all 8 marketplaces. People are finding and buying more on Marketplaces

Since launch, just over 3 weeks, there has been 170,000 searches performed on comments across all marketplaces – no more tired eyes from scrolling pages of comments!

Where to next?

We have made a good start but there is a lot more to come. I am very excited by what 2014 holds. Some of our focus will include

Improving relevancy, refine the algorithm, building layers of sophistication to feed our search algorithm and create a system that learns from user behaviours and needs

Building new features that help showcase our authors' items more effectively and put potential buyers in front of relevant items more often. Utilising the power of the collective network.

Taking a long hard look at facets, browse, sort, navigation and taxonomy, aiming to simplify this experience, create a deeper ontological model that better represents our data and user behaviours and ultimately help people find what they are looking for more efficiently.

Turning the lights out on the old search, we still have some parts of the site on the old search including some of the API, forums, collections search and attributes. We need to move these on to the new platform.

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Envato Values and Search

I often get asked by the community how we choose what we prioritise or how we make decisions on what business rules to implement with respect to relevancy, new features etc. This is both a simple and complex answer. Sometimes the things we do are based on legacy systems or a future vision which is often difficult to explain without a fair amount of context. On the flip side, the thing I like most about working at Envato is there are a great set of values on which we drive our decisions. My favourites are "if the community succeeds, we succeed" and "fair go".

Thank-yous…

Thank-you to the Search Team – Sean, Glen, Julian & Damir - for a fantastic job this year. We've worked closely with many of our Marketplace colleagues including Business Intelligence, Marketing, Support & our Community Team.

A special shout out though to Terry our guru web analyst, Cath (Search Team Alumni) and all of the fantastic community members, our authors and buyers, too many to mention, who have given us feedback and assisted with testing. Thank you for helping to make search better for everyone!

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