Resources
Blog
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Fun with Types
External ReferenceBy Javier Iglesias on 02 May 2019
Over the past few months, TypeScript has become an increasingly popular language. According to the 2018 State of JS survey, if we omit the ES6 standard, it is the top trending JavaScript dialect.
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UX Design Tips for an eCommerce Experience filled with Empathy
External Reference30 April 2019
eCommerce sites have taken the high street and more traditional shopping by storm and you can now find literally any kind of shop online.
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The Quest for Holy Grail Part 2: User Intent
External ReferenceBy Germán Heredia on 26 April 2019
Last year I started a trilogy of articles to share the path we’ve taken, and the discoveries we’ve made, in the quest to find search happiness, starting by looking at the search journey.
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Introducing the ‘all-in-one’ Search Performance Visualisation
Blog PostBy Germán Heredia on 23 April 2019
We continue to explore the Daily Dist Report and another useful visualisation; Search Performance. One of the key, and incredibly useful, features of this visualisation is the way it easily highlights and draws comparisons between behaviour and performance across various devices.
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Make sure this Easter is egg-stra special
Blog PostBy Borja Santaolalla on 16 April 2019
As we make the final preparations this week for the long Easter weekend, we thought we’d take a look at not only the impact of this period on eCommerce but also the different traditions and shopping habits it generates. Looking at not only the differences from one country to another but also the variances in customs and traditions regionally too.
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10 Common Errors Every Tester Should Look out For
External ReferenceBy Jorge Gabriel on 11 April 2019
Software quality tests are designed to validate the stability, speed, and scalability of a tested program’s characteristics. This is done in order to ensure that the program operates perfectly as expected and to establish possible areas for improvement.
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Become a mind reader: Predict your users’ next moves with Next Queries
Blog Post08 April 2019
After a user has submitted a query, the Next Queries service is able to present them with a new set of suggested queries that are related to the initial one. This service makes educated predictions as to what the user may want to do next.
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Why the Now Visualisation is whipping up a storm, a bubbly one
External ReferenceBy Germán Heredia on 05 April 2019
The simplicity, meaningfulness and instantaneity of presenting real-time searches in little bubbles to spot trends and create a clear picture of what’s happening at that very moment in the online store is not only incredibly useful but mesmerising and fascinating.
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Turn your No Results Queries into Opportunities
Blog PostBy Borja Santaolalla on 03 April 2019
No Results pages present a massive roadblock to any search journey. They cause frustration and, more often than not, they are the main reason a customer chooses to leave a site.
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Behind Seasonal Keywords Visualisation
Blog PostBy Germán Heredia on 19 March 2019
Seasonal Keywords is the visualisation for you if you need to observe the behaviour of particular terms within a seasonal framework or when you need to make comparisons between the performance of two different terms. Of course, you can also always resort to the previously mentioned Stats API reports to retrieve the particular data or details you need for your own search performance analysis.
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Adapt and Anticipate Create an Instant Search experience that performs
Blog Post12 March 2019
As context awareness has become a key differentiator for brand experiences, search has become all about anticipation and adaptation. It helps make users feel special and understood. It’s often thought that the best way to achieve this is to provide greater degrees of personalisation.
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Build a cheaper, more flexible VPN solution on AWS with our open-source OpenVPN Certificate Authority
External Reference11 March 2019
Today we’re open-sourcing our in-house OpenVPN Certificate Authority and management platform. Built on AWS with serverless technologies, it has proven to be a reliable, easy to use and secure platform. With this open-source release we hope it can be useful to others as well.
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So why is it that there are so few women in Tech?
External Reference08 March 2019
It’s a universally acknowledged and, neither hidden nor denied, fact that women are vastly under-represented in the Tech industry. The figures from every continent and within every segment speak for themselves.
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Use Links to promote key products with the Empathy Playboard
Blog PostBy Borja Santaolalla on 06 March 2019
'Links' is part of the Empathy Playboard. It’s a powerful tool for associating relevant content to the intent of specific queries. It’s super easy to use. You just copy/paste a URL into the Links section of Playboard and add your desired keywords.
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Map Out Your Search APIs for a More Global Understanding
External ReferenceBy Germán Heredia on 05 March 2019
As most of our customers operate internationally, we’ve often found that when analysing search data, it behaves differently depending on the location…
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2019 A Year of Transformations
Blog PostBy Germán Heredia on 01 March 2019
In January, our teams from across Spain and the UK met in Gijón to discuss our ideas for the future; what EmpathyBroker wants to be when it grows up. We talked in depth about what we want to create, where we want to be, and the many ways in which we can continue to inject a little more empathy into the world of eCommerce (and beyond).
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What can Walt Disney teach us about UX design? Part I
Blog PostBy Jorge Soto on 27 February 2019
The use of animation in user interfaces has been present since the start on the ‘www’ era. In the early days, animation was used as a way to show off rather than to give users the best experience. Flying logos and (skippable) intros were at large and computers with sufficient power to create more compelling stuff were in the minority.
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When Search becomes Alive
External ReferenceBy Angel Maldonado on 26 February 2019
A Search Result is, ultimately, an inanimate thing, an object which can make you feel good or bad, but just that, a thing.
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Getting the Gist of the DailyDist
Blog PostBy Germán Heredia on 20 February 2019
The Stats API is able to generate several reports for different approaches or analytic intentions. Whether you’re looking at things from a query perspective or analysing user-centric metrics, Stats API covers all events that take place under the search experience. These reports are automatically connected with your EmpathyBroker Playboard. That’s where you have a complete overview of your search performance and insights.
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Does London Fashion Week Really Get Heads Turning On The High Street?
Blog PostBy Germán Heredia on 19 February 2019
As London Fashion Week draws to an end today, we thought it would be fun to take a look at data from one of the world’s largest fashion retailers to see if this huge fashion event actually influences real consumers’ shopping patterns.
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This Valentine’s Day… did your search experience fill your customers with love?
Blog PostBy Angel Maldonado on 15 February 2019
Gifting days can often be a nightmare for people who are desperately looking for the right present. While there is a high purchase intent this is often accompanied by a bewilderment about what to buy that can lead to us desperately buying something even though we know it’s not quite right.
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How to set up Synonyms using Synonimize & Play API
Blog Post12 February 2019
Good use of synonyms is essential for providing a positive search experience. In this article we take a quick look at when and how you implement them with our Synonymize feature.
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How eCommerce search has evolved with our changing behaviour online
External ReferenceBy Jorge Gabriel on 08 February 2019
Search tools have become the favourite way for most customers to find products in an online store. Where, when, and how that tool is accessed and interacted with now determines whether or not a user will stay in a particular eCommerce portal.
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Gradient Descent An Algorithm for Deep Learning Optimisation
External Reference05 February 2019
Optimisation algorithms, used to minimise a cost function against training data, are the cornerstone of many mathematical methods, from simple curve fitting to deep machine learning.
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Equalizer An introduction to search relevance
Blog PostBy Borja Santaolalla on 05 February 2019
The Search Relevance Equalizer (or EQ for short) enables you to configure the order in which your search results appear by changing the weighting of different criteria.
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Visual Search is Revolutionising the way we Shop
Blog PostBy Angel Maldonado on 31 January 2019
Over the last few years, visual content has slowly been replacing text to reach its current position as the most important online content. Social networks have been leading the way with this concept shift; in the last year, Instagram’s active user base grew by 64% and that of Pinterest by an incredible 111%.
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Related Tags A Design Perspective
Blog PostBy Paula Natal on 29 January 2019
Related tags do exactly what they say. They show suggested terms associated with a search query. They’re especially helpful when users struggle to generate specific queries, leading to more accurate results and greater findability. Related tags may also be used to draw attention to related products. If the user chooses to add “mirrorless” to the query, this causes “35mm lens” to appear, revealing the lens most commonly used and purchased with mirrorless cameras.
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How to enhance your search experience using Related Tags
Blog Post22 January 2019
Related Tags are a great tool to help users to articulate a more specific query. They provide refinement suggestions that are inferred through collaborative filtering (i.e. from user search sessions). Related Tags are a more playful approach to refining an original query. When used correctly, they are able to speak the user’s language and become extremely handy if a user searches using only generic terms or categories. Ultimately, Related Tags lead to significant increases in findability.
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How to monitor the age of your AWS credentials, using Terraform, Go, AWS Lambda and Slack
External ReferenceBy Ramiro Álvarez on 21 January 2019
Not so long ago, the world relied on machines that had to be managed and provisioned manually. Luckily for us developers, the past couple of years have seen a new wave of technologies become the new standard. I’m talking about Serverless Architecture and Infrastructure Automation. I was exposed to both technologies 6 months ago and I fell in love.
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How to Measure Search
Blog PostBy Olalla Salazar on 16 January 2019
Why Site Search matters? Search visits are the ones that offer the highest Conversion Rates and, what’s more, the best engagement with your site. Average session duration and page per...
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Dynamically provisioning Jenkins nodes in AWS
External ReferenceBy Roberto Devesa on 15 January 2019
The saying “Treat your servers like cattle, not like pets” has become increasingly popular among developers in recent years, largely thanks to the proliferation of virtual machines and containers.
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Promoting search results through the Boost feature
Blog PostBy Borja Santaolalla on 09 January 2019
BOOST- Promote the products you want in search The Boost feature in your Playboard is very a powerful tool, in fact, probably the most frequently used one among search merchandisers. Boosts allow you to promote products in search; that is, to push to the top of the search results page (i.e. SERP) any product from your catalogue, whether or not it contains the searched keyword.
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Retail predictions for a fruitful 2019
Blog PostBy Angel Maldonado on 08 January 2019
Last year was a particularly poignant year for online retail and innovation. Social commerce continued to flourish with Instagram adding exciting new ways to shop on the app as well as influencing the success of online fast-fashion brands, Marks & Spencer ramped up its efforts to become a digital-first business with the launch of a “Data Fellowship”, an innovative skills initiative to create “the most data-literate leadership team in retail” and DFS launched a new augmented reality feature on iPhones to bring the lounge to life.
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Dear Retailers Give the gift of empathy this Christmas
Blog PostBy Angel Maldonado on 19 December 2018
The Christmas tree is up, tinsel decorates the living room and a fire blazes beautifully in the background. The presents start to mount under the tree as we near yuletide; the time for giving, the time for joy and the time for shared experiences is upon us.
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eDisMax Query Parser — A parser to be going mad for?
External Reference18 December 2018
Want to find what you’re looking for? Welcome to parser-dome, search warrior! For Solr to return the results you expect, you need your queries to have an understandable syntax. Depending on the parser you use to transform raw queries into Solr-compatible objects, those queries can be interpreted in different ways.
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Understanding the basics of Akka HTTP
External Reference11 December 2018
First of all, Akka http is not a framework, it’s not a skeleton to build your application or service upon. It is instead a suite of libraries that allow you to create a REST / HTTP interface to connect to your application.
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Igniting the future of data with Apache Spark
External ReferenceBy Edgar Herrero on 27 November 2018
Let’s face it, data has become a crucial and irreplaceable part of today’s society. Data sets of hundreds or thousands of GBs are routinely used, for example, by businesses trying to optimize their processes or even by entire industries looking for marketing trends and trying to predict the next big craze.
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How to design effective data visualisations
External ReferenceBy José Cabañeros on 22 November 2018
The value of data and data visualisations. Whether you’re writing an email, checking your tweets, streaming some music, or Googling life’s most important questions, such as “Can dogs see colours?”, these routine online actions generate large amounts of data. Usually, without us even being aware of it.
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Getting Smart with Special Dates
Blog PostBy Angel Maldonado on 21 November 2018
With the World Cup and accompanying heatwave now a distant memory and summer clothes long buried at the back of the wardrobe, the work really begins for brands and retailers.
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6 tips to improve onsite search in Mercadona Online
External ReferenceBy Borja Santaolalla on 20 November 2018
Last week, I enjoyed reading ¿Por qué no hay SEO en Mercadona Online? or ‘Why is there no SEO on Mercadona Online?’. I sincerely applauded Jose Tarheel for openly sharing key insights on Mercadona’s product roadmap and digital strategy. Big kudos to his organisation for embracing a culture of transparency.