Beeline is a service whose goal is to predict the search patterns of users and present those results within the posts of your WordPress powered site. Unfortunately, I have no idea if it’s working or not. If I could review Beeline in one word, it would be LOST. The journey begins by visiting the Beeline website which tells me what the service is supposed to do. In order to use Beeline, you’ll have to download and install their plugin after you verify that you own the site Beeline will be displayed on. After you receive your key and paste that into the correct field within the plugin, you’ll need to wait about 24 hours before the service crawls the content of your site.
There is not much in the way of options. The only thing I have at my disposal to control how Beeline works is to limit the categories that will be indexed. This is where things start to get frustrating because I can’t find any information on the Beeline website which explains in plain English what this plugin or service will do to my particular website. Furthermore, I have no idea where the bees will show up within my content. In some posts, there are 1-3 bees with semi-relevant search results while in many other posts, there is nothing. While browsing around WPTavern.com, I’ve noticed that the bees generally show up within long posts. After finally finding a bee within my content, this is what it looks like.
Finally Found A Bee!
That bee was found within the review I published of the Backup Buddy Plugin. Here is what the related search results looked like.
Related Search Results
I give the search results a 6 out of 10 for relevance. However, further down in the same post, Beeline shows terrible related search results that have nothing to do with the topic discussed. *NOTE* The bees have been removed as I have uninstalled this plugin.
Conclusion:
Beeline needs some polish and at the very least, a documentation or help page that clearly explains what the heck is going on behind the scenes that leads to the results served by Beeline. It’s disappointing that as a user, I can not determine where the bees show up. As far as I know, it’s random. I’d rather position the Bee at the bottom of the post. Considering there are at times, multiple bees within a post, it has me thinking that the entire post is not being used as the basis of the search results. Instead, it’s specific sections or blocks of text. I think the search results would be more accurate if the entire post were used as the baseline instead of certain sections. Also keep in mind that there is no way to filter the results served by Beeline so you could end up showing visitors results that you don’t approve of.
My opinion is to wait until the service is out of beta before giving it a spin.
I don’t understand why anyone would want to install this plugin. I mean, website admins spend time and in a lot of cases money to get people to visit their sites and the whole premise of this plugin seems to be to send them away. Just doesn’t make sense to me. Feeling LOST as well.
@Michael Fields – It’s worth noting that you can browse the search results and such through the widget which prevents them from actually leaving your website. So that’s a non issue.