Hoping I'm not violating unwritten list rules by mentioning this - if
anybody is interested in playing with search analytics, seek out your
nearest AquaBrowser - it has been offering search analytics from the
offset. It provides all the metrics mentioned below (plus some others
like popular refine facets, sorting methods and items), either visually
or in XML format so you can roll your own. No-matching queries are
called 'orphan queries' in AB jargon and our customers generally
consider them one of the most useful features because it allows for
catalog cleanup, acquisition decisions, etc.

One of the challenges of course is how to interpret search statistics.
90% percent of users don't go beyond page one: is it because our ranking
works so well, or because they immediately change their query instead of
looking further, or because they can't find the 'next page' link?

For more on library search analytics: Jimmy Thomas of The Library
Corporation together with Lynn Wheeler and Scott Reinhart of Carroll
County PL (MD), wrote a paper on a search analytics for LIANZA (Library
and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa) 2006, which can be
found in full here:
http://www.tlcdelivers.com/enews/default.asp?Display=22.


--

Taco Ekkel
Director of Development

Medialab Solutions bv
http://www.medialab.nl/
Modemstraat 2b
1033 RW Amsterdam
The Netherlands

office: +31 (0)20 635 3190
fax:    +31 (0)20 633 7765


-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
K.G. Schneider
Sent: zaterdag 3 februari 2007 21:09
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] search analytics, part deux

Someone wrote to ask me what I mean by search analytics. Fair question.

The blurb for Lou Rosenfeld and Rich Wiggins' forthcoming book pretty
much
does a good job of describing what I mean:

http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/searchanalytics/

"Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting
on
top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that
capture
what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how
many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are
real
data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own
words.
This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a
conversation
with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve
your
content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs."

By "roll-your-own" analytics, I'm talking about taking techniques such
as
this:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/08/21/better_search_engine.html

Or, from an in-house recipe we used last year, produce logs this way:

Ingredients

Timestamp, original query, normalized query, parameters, number of
results, referring page, IP or session ID

Procedure

Timestamp: best format is year-month-day:hour:minute:second

Original query: as entered by user

Normalized query: after lowercasing, stemming, removal of field names,
etc.

Parameters: any field names, languages, character sets, etc. Nice to
put the results page number in here

Number of results: unique to search engine, 0 hits is very important

Referring page: referer field, useful for locating confusing
locations within the sites, external links, etc.

IP or session ID: allows us to follow the progress of a multi-part
query. session ID is far better for privacy considerations.

Mix. Produce (at minimum) these reports:

Top 1% of query terms (often 10-15% of all queries)

top no-matches queries (0 results)

top referring pages for search, both internal and external

number and sources of empty queries

---

Note that you don't have to run these queries continuously to get useful
information. A strong sample can be invaluable. For that matter, if
you're
doing iterative evaluation-say, across vendor products-using the same
terms
is almost essential; I was turning into Jack from The Shining by the end
of
our search engine implementation at my Former Place Of Work, but the
consistency was important.


Karen G. Schneider
Acting Associate Director of Libraries for Technology & Research
Florida State University
Email/AIM: [log in to unmask]
Blog: http://quodvide.wordpress.com
Phone: 850-644-5214
Cell: 850-590-3370