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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