SearchNode joins Nosto to build a future of ecommerce experience together
Looking back to the 00s, when ecommerce started growing, a need for site-search technologies has also risen. Users were visiting online stores, and it took them hours to find products they were interested in. One of the first popular site-search technologies to solve this issue was Endeca. They offered Faceted search, which was a great innovation back then, and ecommerce businesses started adopting it as the #1 search solution.
From the 00s to approximately 2015, search technologies have been evolving, there was no advanced search feature anymore (do you still remember a big table to specify your search query?), features like autocomplete, spellcheck, faceted search, synonyms, and boosting have become pretty standard across different search solutions.
Some of the search companies even went public. Some were very popular in their own regions, like Germany. Some started offering search as a complementary product alongside other customer experience technologies. However, none of the companies in this field have dominated the global market, especially looking at them now. Most of them are not even active in the market anymore. And if you are not active, meaning no aggressive product development and iterations, you are out of the competition. So in my eyes, most of the companies who tried taking the global ecommerce search market in the 00s until approx 2015 are out.
Today we have a few big search providers. One started in 2012 as a search API for developers, and another started a few years prior as an ecommerce search built for marketers and business people. I love both companies, they are super aggressive in sales and marketing, however, both products’ have one significant issue – they require a lot of workforce and time to configure and continuously maintain to have acceptable search experience and use features they offer (which sounds great but rarely used well due to difficulty). And it’s not just my opinion, this is what I have heard from their clients for the last 3-4 years, and I know what they need to switch.
Therefore, I believe that the ecommerce search solutions market has a huge opportunity now to build a search that has outstanding search relevance and offers in-depth merchandising capabilities and continuous improvement capabilities like personalization, A/B testing, and segmentation. This might sound familiar, however, all this should come out of the box, which means that it doesn’t need to be configured in advance by spending thousands of hours. A power of self-learning, predictability, and automation.
Imagine a search solution, that out of the box, learns and decides what products are relevant, personalizes them for different segments and users, ranks by business priorities, seasons and makes it super easy for a business to experiment and understand results.
This is why SearchNode is joining Nosto – to fill a massive gap in the market and finally offer the next flagship search product alongside the whole Commerce Experience Platform. Fully integrated, exchanging data and ML models across the platform, and working together as one.
We’ve been building these capabilities that I’m talking about for the last few years. At SearchNode, we have become known for very well automated search relevance and merchandising. When we talk to our clients, they consistently mention how easy it is to use SearchNode’s solution and its outstanding result in conversions and profits uplift. We’ll take this to the next level with Nosto personalized search to scale fast in the global ecommerce market.
Why Nosto? First of all, we share the same values while building a business, like consistency and business sustainability. Hyperscaling is great, but sustainable scaling is better, especially in B2B. Secondly, we have a great cultural fit and easily understand each other, not even talking about sharing the same time zone with Helsinki where a large part of the Nosto product team is based. Finally, Nosto is still not a huge thousand people company which means we can be very fast in making decisions, developing the product, and iterating.
I’m very excited about this partnership with Nosto. It’s a big thing for our team, our country Lithuania and, of course, the ecommerce market.
We are just getting started, so stay tuned and join us to build the future of commerce experiences together!
Antanas Bakšys
Co-Founder and CEO at SearchNode
