It has been a few weeks since I first installed Searchles related posts widget in my blog. So what is my opinion?
These are some of the features I like about Searchles Related Content Widget.
Ease of setup and configuration: It's so easy to set up. You don't need to worry about java scripts. Choose colors and size of the widget, and it's ready to go. The number of links displayed depends on the size of the widget. In comparison, it's way easier than installing Adsense (not that Adsense is hard to install).
Doesn't rely on tags/labels alone: It will work even if your site doesn't have labels/categories. I guess because Searchles scans all pages to display, it's more accurate than relying on labels.
Report for clicks : The best feature I like is I can see the report of clicks from the widget, which you can't get with other related post scripts. It's great to be able to check how many people use it to find more information. As visitors can see related information easily, it will somehow encourage them to stay around a bit longer. The disadvantage of it might be less frequent use of search box to find more information because the visitors are finding related information easier. But I'm not sure yet if that's the case.
What I am not so thrilled of
Index frequency: Although the initial indexing was pretty fast, I don't think it indexed every single post of my blog. It doesn't seem to scan frequently after that (based on the Indexed Articles stat). I hope they fix this issue to make it a perfect related post/content widget.
Overall, I'm very happy with it. I hope visitors are finding it useful too.
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Hi Swanie, many thanks for the review. I peeked into our index and I see that we have 100 posts from your site indexed, which I believe is the same number you have posted (correct me if I am wrong).
I think the problem stems from how report that statistic, so maybe we need to reexamine how we plot that particular graph. Actually, now that I look at it, I think that graph is just plain wrong. Looking at our cache, I can see we indexed almost all of your content on March 20th, except for the articles that were created after March 20th. After the initial crawl, articles will be indexed either by the rss feed which we hit every 30 minutes, or the first time a user visits the page our widget will trigger its indexing. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks for the feedback, we will take a look at that statistic and see if we can fix it.
thanks!
Chris Seline
founder/cto
Searchles Inc.
www.searchles.com
Hi Chris, thanks for the clarification. Cheers.