There were no official announcements made, which is a shame, but last week Canada’s most influential online service celebrated its tenth anniversary.
On the morning of November 29, 1995, at simultaneous press conferences in Toronto and Montreal, the Sympatico Internet service was announced.
Although the Sympatico signup software kit was intended to go on sale the following day, some curious and keen Canadians showed up at Bell stores on the 29th asking for the software and were able to purchase it 24-hours ahead of time. (By the way, you can often tell who some of the very first Sympatico members are by their email addresses. Some of them were lucky enough to be able to create accounts using just their first names, such as john@ as opposed to john.smith2000@.)
Backed by a (somewhat unruly and definitely ungainly) consortium made up of most, but not all, of Canada’s 10+ regional telcos at the time, Sympatico would go on to become Canada’s largest and most well-known consumer Internet service provider with millions of subscribers. The Sympatico.ca Website, later to be christened a “portal,” grew and grew to become Canada’s number one Internet media property, with over 15 million unique visitors a month.
Category: Bill Sweetman
Since it’s that time of the year, and I loathe shopping in the real world, I’m spending more than my usual amount of time shopping online.
Last week I was on Henry’s Website in the middle of purchasing some camera gear when I stumbled across a touch of pure e-commerce genius. Right below the section of the shopping cart where I could enter my credit card information was a simple but powerful eight-word sentence that rocked my world.
Next to an optional checkbox was written…
We all know that anything to do with search is hot these days.
And now the smart companies are starting to take a closer look at the search engines on their own sites.
Whether you call this “site search” or “internal search” or ‘who-knows-what’ search, I predict this area is going to see a lot of excitement and evolution in the next few years.
I recently completed a fascinating site search consulting project for a large media company. Since they publish a number of magazines, they have a vast content archive and a vested interest in making it as easy as possible for Website visitors to be able to get to their content as efficiently as possible.
My company was hired to help the media company understand how to improve their site search. During the course of the project, my colleagues and I developed an unofficial list of what we started to refer to as “Site Search Best Practices.” These best practices are independent of any one particular site search system (i.e., the technology solution) and will be of benefit to any company, large or small, that is implementing site search.
So, without much further ado, here are some of our Site Search Best Practices: