Table of Contents
(An early version, quite revised since beginning the book.)
Overview
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What is search analytics (SA)?
- Anatomy of a search log
- Anatomy of a search log report
- SA shows us what users want
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Why is SA useful?
- SA is a conversation with your site's users
- SA shows us patterns that describe what users really want
- SA provides data that help you make informed design decisions
SA: an Unexploited Opportunity
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Why everyone should care about SA
- Search is not a techie thing
- SA is good data
- SA is inexpensive
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Why web designers should care about SA
- Helps you make informed choices about how to improve your site's performance by identifying specific problem areas
- SA is apolitical: shows usage of entire site, and is not impacted by turf battles
- Identifies gaps in content coverage, problems with metadata
- Half your users are search dominant, so improving search will have a big impact
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Why marketers should care about SA
- Search logs might be your best, cheapest source of information on what customers really want
- Few organizations are taking advantage of SA; be first and you gain a competitive advantage
- SA not only improves your site, but can help inform design of future marketing campaigns in other media/channels
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Why user experience professionals should care about SA
- SA as a user research method: strengths
- SA as a user research method: limitations
- SA and other user research methods
How to Analyze a Search Log
- What kind of skills, resources, tools, access, and allies (e.g., IAs, content managers) you'll need to analyze a search log
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Creating SA reports
- Use simple scripts or other analysis tools
- Commonly Web server logs
- Local searches (what they typed into your search box) vs. referral searches (what they searched for at a major search engine that led them to your site)
- Build a rank-ordered list of most popular searches
- Break down the report (when possible):
- A closer look: using SA to examine usage sessions
- How you can (and can't) use commercial and public domain tools in SA report generation
What to Learn from Your Analysis
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General categories of questions
- User research
- Content analysis
- Vocabulary development
- Search results design
- Interface design
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Questions for specific types of readers
- Web designers/developers
- Marketers
- UX professionals
- IT professionals (e.g., how to improve search engines' technical performance)
- Managers
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Genre-specific questions, potential answers, and actionable next steps (and brief case studies/stories)
- Commerce sites
- Academic sites
- Enterprise intranets
- News/media sites
- Research sites
- Entertainment sites
- Social network sites
- Multimedia sites
How to use SA to Improve your Site's Design
- Inform and improve other user research techniques you might use
- Improving your site's content (e.g., create content for common queries with zero results)
- Improving your site's tagging (e.g., look for synonyms that may feed into thesaurus)
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Improving search results (e.g., Best Bets)
- "Regular" Best Bets
- Pro-active Best Bets
- Adding Best Bets to your search environment
- Improving the search interface (e.g., query box width)
Comments
How about adding a section under genre-specific questions about membership/subscription content sites? Or would that qualify as a research site? I'm thinking of professional society web sites and publishing sites that provide member-only access to a large content collection.
Posted by: David Gammel | June 9, 2006 9:06 AM
I think the book will be a fascinating read, guys, and I look forward to the finished product. I didn't see it explicitly in the TOC, but will you be addressing how search analytic techniques can help with *new* site design?
The reason I ask is that some business/org owners have a body of documents they may want to place on their new site, and I can imagine how some of the techniques you're writing about could be used on those docs to extrapolate future popular searches, and aid designers in organizing and building the site.
It may not be part of your vision for this book, but perhaps for a future work?
Best of luck with the book!
jkc
Posted by: Jack Cole | June 9, 2006 11:00 AM
David and Jack, interesting ideas. We'll have to think about subscription-based sites and how they may or may not be different. One advantage is the ability to identify *who* is doing the searching, thereby connecting search behaviors to demographics. New site design is an interesting twist too, but wouldn't you need to already have a site in place from which to gather search behaviors in the first place?
Posted by: Lou Rosenfeld | June 12, 2006 11:33 AM
Have you done any specific analysis on investment/financial research sites? After many years managing the publishing function in equity /fixed income research departments of investment banks I have been increasingly drawn into IA and web value debates. So far I have not seen much material on financial research content management - do you plan to cover this area specifically?
Posted by: Conor MacGillycuddy | July 12, 2006 10:31 AM
Conor, no analysis in that area or plans for it. If you can point us in any directions or provide some background to help shape our thinking there, we'd really appreciate it.
Posted by: Lou Rosenfeld | July 12, 2006 10:54 AM