First and foremost, behavioral data collected is fine so long as privacy is maintained, As for the search features, we’ll have to see how well things work out in that dept.

San Francisco (InfoWorld) - WebSideStory this week is announcing that it will marry its back-end Web analytics engine with consumer-facing search engine technology in Search Version 4.0.

Company executives believe the shaping of site search responses based on behavioral data collected by analytics will result in higher sales for WebSideStory’s enterprise customers.

The technology, dubbed Active Ranking and Active Navigation, allows the search engine to write to a suite of APIs in the analytics engine to pull data out of the system. Consumer searches on retail sites, for example, could present results based on most commonly purchased model, color, or style of product.

How a user navigates a site can be changed based on what users typically want to see first, said Steve Kusmer, senior vice president, general manager at WebSideStory.

Although the marriage of analytics and search is not new, Susan Aldrich, senior vice president at Patricia Seybold Group said until now the push has been coming from companies offering search first and adding analytics later…. Source: InfoWorld