Alex, a college student, writes:

...I'm building a web based library catalog for a special collection of books as part of a group software engineering project. My group has been really interested in UX methods related to conceptual models and task based evaluation (so on the qualitative end) but we are also interested in using some more quantitative methods. Since search is such a key feature of our site, and can provide such telling insight in general, I thought I would reach out to you.

Do you have any suggestions for what types of information to log beyond the query (and IP, host, browser info) or any other advice / cautions?

My quick answer for Alex:

Definitely try to log which pages queries originated from (and what those queries were). This will help you understand where navigation might be failing and what people search when it does fail. (Thereby enabling you to improve contextual navigation from those pages.) You should also log the other end of the process: what search results people click through. This will help determine what's popular; you can also compare which documents are clicked through with which ones you want to have clicked through (and thereby test your most frequent queries' performance). Also log the time and date so you can track sessions.

What might you add?