A brief welcome
Rich and I have been working on our book on and off for many months now. We're about halfway done, and plan to finish our writing this summer. We've still got lots to do, and this "book in progress" site will go a long way to getting us there. It's an ideal place to share information on search analytics, test ideas, and, most importantly, get your input. We'd like you to feel a part of this book, and if you participate here and help us, we'll acknowledge your help in the printed version.
By the way, this site won't go away when the book's completed; we'll continue maintaining it and, we hope, engaging in a dialogue with you here about search analytics. Books don't have to be monologues any longer, thanks to sites like this one. So we're looking forward to a long and productive conversation with our readers and anyone interested in applying search analytics to their web sites and intranets.
Comments
I've been having a weblog discussion with persons interested in federal government information management topics, and one of the topics centered around federated search - that is, using one search box to locate information from disparate data sources (databases, email, etc.).
Specifically, the discussion centered on what search requirements to include in the RFP.
Have you thought about federated search against electronic data sources beyond what is on the Internet/Intranet?
Posted by: Rob Fay | June 9, 2006 02:21 PM
Rob, thanks for the links; it's really heartening to see government agencies encouraged to consider search analytics (and, really, any user-centered considerations) in their requirements. And it's great advice to consider federated search; it's now on the list! Thanks again.
Posted by: Lou Rosenfeld | June 12, 2006 11:29 AM
Lou -
Thanks for posting this start at the book. It was good to see Rich's story of the msu.edu site, and it's instructive to compare the quality of those search results with e.g. the search on umich.edu which can be awful.
I find that search analytics is really useful when I write and maintain my blogs, since it's super helpful to see where the traffic is coming from and what people are finding. Blog searches often turn up wrong results because there are lots of words on the page not all of which are related. A little story -
I posted an article some time back on Vacuum about spiders (in the sense of search engine spiders). It got a few hits and then went dormant. I was looking through search logs and found out that there was a successful hit for "michigan spiders", and knowing that I hadn't written anything about that, I whipped up a page. Now according to mybloglog and measuremap that one page is the top search hit by a wide margin, with lots of people who search for "michigan spiders", "spiders in michigan" and variations on the same hitting it. I put some good links there so it's serving a useful purpose.
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti | June 12, 2006 11:37 PM