Comments on: Five Sites to Watch in 2010 – Pt. 2 – CDW http://www.socialtis.net/2010/02/five-sites-to-watch-in-2010-pt-2-cdw/ Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:29:56 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: KeithR http://www.socialtis.net/2010/02/five-sites-to-watch-in-2010-pt-2-cdw/comment-page-1/#comment-328 KeithR Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:12:29 +0000 http://www.socialtis.net/?p=406#comment-328 I _almost_ agree...but when you get into the meat of trying to buy something from their site, they come up lacking. For example, you can search on "firewall" and then filter to "Brand:Juniper" - but there it stops. You now have 331 products to search through - all firewall related, but almost none of them actual firewalls. This of course is not limited to Juniper. If you do the same thing with Cisco, you get 256 products - but still now way to distinguish the actual box from stuff that might go with it - like a license. You can try search-within-a-search - for example adding "appliance" - but that leaves a lot of guesswork to the user. They need a more comprehensive, meta-data driven catalog. Here's one that truly rocks (on a very boring subject): http://search.tycoelectronics.com/electronics/?ui_mode=question&charset=UTF-8&language=en-US&questionsource=electronics&search_type=Text&question_box=relay (Tyco Electronics; sample query "relay") I _almost_ agree…but when you get into the meat of trying to buy something from their site, they come up lacking. For example, you can search on “firewall” and then filter to “Brand:Juniper” – but there it stops. You now have 331 products to search through – all firewall related, but almost none of them actual firewalls. This of course is not limited to Juniper. If you do the same thing with Cisco, you get 256 products – but still now way to distinguish the actual box from stuff that might go with it – like a license. You can try search-within-a-search – for example adding “appliance” – but that leaves a lot of guesswork to the user.

They need a more comprehensive, meta-data driven catalog. Here’s one that truly rocks (on a very boring subject): http://search.tycoelectronics.com/electronics/?ui_mode=question&charset=UTF-8&language=en-US&questionsource=electronics&search_type=Text&question_box=relay (Tyco Electronics; sample query “relay”)

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