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ChoiceBot technology is not just for e-Retailers. ChoiceBot Search Solutions take the pain out of searching through large inventories of choices where users are tasked to find the ‘best’ options, based on their individual criteria.
ChoiceBot search technology can be easily integrated with a variety of data-centric websites such as…
- Real estate sites
- Dating sites
- Career sites
- Automotive sites
- Securities (stocks, mutual funds, etc.) selection sites
- Mortgage and insurance sites
- Travel sites
Because of its ease of integration, even smaller, niche sites can leverage ChoiceBot technology to differentiate themselves, and revolutionize their user experience:
- Nanny-finding sites
- Professional (lawyer, dentist, etc) referral sites
- Specialized classified services
- …etc.
Integration Information
ChoiceBot is a software application that is designed to run either ‘on-demand’ on our servers, or on a server in your datacenter. It works by regularly reading data from your inventory, and using that data to dynamically generate a ChoiceBot product selection interface that can be embedded in a product selection page on your site, so that ChoiceBot appears to be your own powerful new product selection capability.
When a user clicks an action button or link in ChoiceBot, such as “Buy this now”, “Show me more information about this candidate”, “Put this on my wishlist”, etc., they are directed to the appropriate item detail page on your site to take further action.
ChoiceBot can usually be integrated with a site in a few days or less. A typical integration process is described below:
The site owner sends a sample of their data to our Services group, or exposes their database via a secure, read-only connection. This data should include the items (candidates, vehicles, properties, etc.) to be searched by ChoiceBot, any attributes that are associated with those items that users may want to search on, and URLs for the item detail page on your site for each item. We then ensure that our robust Data Import Module is able to read the data, which can be XML, flat file, etc., or read directly via API requests.
Note that the attribute data does not need to be complete in order for ChoiceBot to use it. ChoiceBot’s powerful Trade-Off Analysis Engine handles missing attributes gracefully, so items with incomplete attribute data will still show up in search results.
The front end of the ChoiceBot application requires little to no customization, since the features and attributes that are presented to the user in the ChoiceBot search interface are based directly on your data. If your data contains attributes relating to Age, Education Level, and Metropolitan Area, those features will appear in the ChoiceBot front end. Whether searching for cars or job candidates or travel packages, the rest of ChoiceBot generally does not need to be adapted.
ChoiceBot is installed on a server in your datacenter, and a new search page is created on your site to “host” the ChoiceBot interface so that it appears to be an integral of your site. A new search button or link is added to your site that links to the new search page (with the ChoiceBot interface). When a user views an item in the ChoiceBot interface and clicks an action button for that item (e.g., “Buy this now”, “More information about this item”, etc.), they are directed to the appropriate item detail page on your site to take further action, based on URLs provided with your inventory data. A script or other mechanism is created to send refreshed inventory data to the ChoiceBot server at whatever frequency you require (daily, hourly, on-demand, etc.)
Technical Notes
- The server on which ChoiceBot Vertical Search is installed must have recent versions of PHP and MySQL installed (both are freely available).
- The ChoiceBot front end is entirely HTML- and JavaScript-based. There is no need for proprietary browser plug-ins to be installed by users.
- ChoiceBot Vertical Search is secure, since it does not require any connections outside of your firewall.
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