Conversations with your Customers
Blog Archive
- May 22, 2008: Avi Rappoport's taxonomy of search log junk
- Great posting by Avi. The types she's come up with are: Empty queries Repeat queries Robot crawlers Server hacks Search form "guestbook" spam Internal testing queries Learn more here....
- April 28, 2008: Site search analytics in the NY TImes
- From yesterday's New York Times article on nude vacationing: SpaFinder.com, an online spa search engine, recently created a separate category for “nudist spa vacations” after noticing an increase in searches for the term. Since November, searches on SpaFinder.com for such...
- April 10, 2008: What kinds of data to log?
- 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...
- March 27, 2008: Site search analytics workshop slides
- Just posted my presentation (via the wonderful SlideShare) for my Boston/Sunnyvale/Chicago workshops; enjoy! | View | Upload your own...
- March 25, 2008: Site search analytics talks in Philadelphia, Urbana-Champaign
- I'll be giving a short talk on site search analytics the evening of April 2, graciously sponsored by PhillyCHI and hosted by MessageFirst. Here are the details: Time: 6 - 8PM (social time from 6 - 6:30PM) Location: Messagefirst 230...
- March 10, 2008: Five reasons UX people need site search analtyics
- Balance: UX methodologies/practitioners are often quantitatively weak Legitimacy: Data-driven analyses make an impression on people hard to impress Cost: The data is available; the analysis scales well with available time Fidelity: The data is behavioral, real, and voluminous Comprehensiveness:...
- March 08, 2008: Video on site search analytics
- Nice 10 minute video (albeit blurry) on how to set up site search analytics for Google Analytics:...
- February 29, 2008: Some general questions (and answers) about site search analytics
- What are some of the common questions you hear about site search analytics? More importantly, how do you answer them? We've begun a list of general questions and answers below. What would you add? How would you answer them differently?...
- February 21, 2008: More site search analytics seminars: Silicon Valley, Boston, Chicago
- I'll be headed to Sunnyvale, California March 18 to teach my first workshop on site search analytics, a day-long affair hosted by my friends at Involution Studios' Master Academy. The class will be intimate, as we're limiting attendance to nine...
- December 20, 2007: Rich Wiggins to teach search analytics in Sydney, March 2008
- Fresh from the Nielsen Norman Group's speaking tour, Rich Wiggins will be headed to Sydney in March to teach his day-long class for the wonderful people at Key Forums. I taught a Key Forums class two years ago; the production...
- December 19, 2007: Search analytics slides from An Event Apart
- Better late than never! I totally forgot to post my slides from my presentation at the most excellent An Event Apart in Chicago (last August; guess it's been a busy fall!). Here they are (don't let the goofy typeface scare...
- December 06, 2007: Completing the book (and how you can help)
- If you've been waiting for this book to be available, we appreciate your patience and feel your pain. Rich and I began writing over two years ago, and, a la Damocles, it's been a sword hanging over our heads ever...
- November 08, 2007: Mondosoft quotes Mark Twain
- Recently we grieved the passing of Mondosoft. But according to Mondosoft's Martin Vikkelsø Madsen, "the rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated". Here's the hopeful news, verbatim from Martin: "It’s true that Mondosoft went through a bankruptcy, but cmswatch really...
- November 05, 2007: Hello Google Analytics, Goodbye Mondosoft
- Well, unless you've been vacationing somewhere warm, tropical, and without connectivity, you probably know by now that Google Analytics has finally released its site search analytics functionality. Frankly, I found it pretty difficult to figure out how to turn it...
- October 05, 2007: Changing your content creation strategy
- I'm working on a chapter on using search analytics to improve a site's content. It'll cover some of the stuff you'd expect, like using top null results queries to tune your content offerings. But I'm also hoping to dig a...
- October 01, 2007: Sample chapter: search analytics and metadata
- We're publishing a fairly complete version of our chapter on how you can use internal search analytics to develop and improve metadata (318Kb PDF file). We'd naturally love to hear what you think, especially if we're missing anything obvious, or...
- September 27, 2007: A world of queries
- What the world wants, by query; a fascinating visualization of the planet's information needs: This incredible work comes from the Incom Project (link courtesy of the Information Aesthetics blog)....
- August 17, 2007: Using search analytics to improve navigation
- That will be the title of one of our chapters, and I'm digging into it now. And I'm finding it a bit surprising. Unlike other topics we're covering in the book—using search analytics to improve content development, metadata, search results,...
- July 24, 2007: Series on internal search analytics
- Excellent five-part series (starting here) from Semphonic's CEO, Gary Angel, on internal search analytics. Too much to get into detail here, but nice to see a take on the topic from the analytics side, and Gary's done a great job...
- May 23, 2007: Springtime is a good time to write a book...
- ...or, better yet, finish it. Yes, it's been quiet around here for a while. But Rich and I have been busy. We've given well-received talks on search analytics at the IA Summit, the Emetrics Summit, and Computers In Libraries. We...
- April 12, 2007: Presenting at Computers in Libraries, April 18
- I'll be at Computers in Libraries 2007, Wednesday April 18, to give a talk on search analytics titled "Improving Content with Customer Conversations". Hope to see you there! —Rich Wiggins...
- March 30, 2007: IA Summit talk on search analytics
- Rich Wiggins and I presented on search analytics at the recent IA Summit in Las Vegas. The talk was quite popular; it was one of five that attendees asked to have repeated. And in the week or so since we...
- March 29, 2007: Best bets in 5 minutes
- Improving Search to High Demand Resources with "Best Bets" is an excellent five-minute video introduction to best bets. Presented by Tito Sierra at Code4Lib 2007. —Lou Rosenfeld...
- March 23, 2007: Search analytics talk at IA Summit 2007
- Perhaps a tad bit too late to let you know, but Rich Wiggins and I will be presenting a search analytics talk at the IA Summit in Las Vegas tomorrow. It's apparently a popular topic, as it's one of six...
- January 16, 2007: Digital Web: 2007 will be a big year for search analytics
- Nice to see this prediction in Digital Web magazine. Tiff Fehr's brief posting also includes a useful list of SA tools for competitive intelligence....
- January 05, 2007: Where does the Long Tail begin?
- And, for that matter, what constitutes the middle torso? We've been wondering if there is an accepted, standard way to slice up the friendly Zipf Distribution into a fat head, a middle torso, and a long tail. By percentiles? By...
- January 04, 2007: (Sort of) new list for discussing search analytics
- We're dusting off the SearchLogger Yahoo! group, a moribund list that we helped start back in 2002. Of course we're biased, but Rich and I sense that interest in search analytics will grow rapidly in the next year or two....
- January 03, 2007: Advice on search suggestions
- Eight great pieces of advice on managing suggestions (AKA best bets AKA recommended links) from Avi Rappoport. More than anything, Avi reminds us that suggestions "need active management and investment to keep them fresh and useful," including the obvious (e.g.,...
- December 12, 2006: Free MS Excel template for analyzing queries
- Updated December 19, 2006 (originally posted 12/12/06; added summary spreadsheet, much more functionality) If you're lucky, you're using Mondosoft, WebSideStory, or some other commercial application to generate reports from your query data. If not, we've developed a pair of simple...
- November 01, 2006: We're giving a quick free talk on search analytics
- Rich and I will be making a very brief presentation on search analytics as part of Seth Earley's "Search Solutions Jumpstart Conference Call Series". It's the fourth of four webinars, it takes place this Friday (November 3), 1:30-3pm ET, and...
- October 13, 2006: More on query clustering
- Maxine Armitage of Find It Information Management recently analyzed two years' of search queries from a government agency's intranet. She published her findings in a brief case study (80Kb PDF). We were especially impressed by how Maxine normalized the queries,...
- October 11, 2006: The seasonality of search demonstrated
- I spent some time on Saturday reviewing the past year of search queries performed at MSU.edu, the web site of my employer, Michigan State University. It proved a useful way to distract myself while my co-author's alma mater destroyed my...
- October 01, 2006: Presentation on search analytics
- Last week co-author Lou Rosenfeld gave a talk on seach analytics at the US government's Web Manager University. The Powerpoint file (2.1 Mb) is available here. You might also enjoy Avi Rappoport's excellent presentation at last spring's Enterprise Search Summit....
- September 12, 2006: Search Analytics survey results
- To help us (Lou Rosenfeld and Rich Wiggins) gather information for our forthcoming book on local site search analytics, we invited 206 people to complete a brief survey. The survey ran from June 12 to July 24, 2006, and received...
- September 08, 2006: Search log sample: Mondosoft
- Mondosoft's Robert Piddocke and Martin Vikkelsø Madsen have made available sample queries from the MondoSearch search engine. (This is as good an opportunity as any to acknowledge the wonderful information Mondosoft makes available through its Behavior Tracking subsite. Here's the...
- August 31, 2006: Needed: policies on retention and use of search logs
- The premise of our book is that search analytics, or search log analysis, yields tremendous benefits. We think just about everyone ought to analyze searches their customers perform. If we succeed in our mission, then a lot more organizations will...
- August 07, 2006: AOL: We're sorry
- AOL just issued a press release apologizing for its release of customers' query data: "This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new...
- August 07, 2006: AOL releases data on 20M user queries
- Ed Costello tipped us off to AOL Research's recent release of about 20 million web queries from 500,000 AOL customers. Wow. First, the good news: this could be a boon to researchers and, ultimately, anyone who designs information systems. Search...
- July 31, 2006: Search log sample: htdig
- The Direct Marketing Association's Rob Blakeley has kindly provided sample queries from htdig, a free search engine. DMA uses htdig to make their public site searchable. Here's the legend: XXX.XXX.X.23: Searcher's IP address (partially masked to protect privacy) [19/Jul/2006:04:04:14 -0400]:...
- July 31, 2006: SearchTrack generates reports from multiple search engines
- This looks interesting: New Idea Engineering's SearchTracks uses Javascript to grab and analyze search queries executed through a variety of search tools, including: Verity K2 Verity Ultraseek Hummingbird/Fulcrum Google Appliance The queries are parsed, and the following tidbits are captured...
- July 20, 2006: Avi on search analytics
- We don't know anyone who's more knowledgable about search analytics than SearchTools.com's Avi Rappoport. We weren't able to attend, but it looks like Avi gave an excellent presentation on the topic at last spring's Enterprise Search Summit. You can read...
- July 19, 2006: Search log sample: Google Appliance
- Jeremy Bertrand, Interactive Communications Specialist at the Washington State Department of Transportation, has kindly provided a sample of a search log generated by Google Appliance. These queries were searched from this search interface at the Washington State DoT site. The...
- July 17, 2006: Just in case you were wondering...
- ...Rosenfeld Media is indeed the publisher of our book, not O'Reilly and Associates. There's been some confusion, and the result is that many booksellers' catalogs list O'Reilly as the publisher (and the book as available!). No on both accounts: Rosenfeld...
- July 10, 2006: Search log potluck
- We (Lou and Rich) have been able to poke into a few sample logs from a variety of organizations. But for privacy reasons it's been difficult to come by samples that could be publicly shared. It's a pity, as some...
- June 28, 2006: The Middle Torso
- Search queries, when counted and sorted by frequency, fall into a hockey stick-shaped Zipf Distribution (you can see an example from Michigan State University in our Chapter One draft). A handful of the most common queries generally account for a...
- June 27, 2006: A web analytics take on search analytics
- We've recently been in touch with Intuit's Avinash Kaushik, who runs the popular web metrics blog Occam's Razor. Yesterday's excellent posting, Are You Into Internal Site Search Analysis? You Should Be, has already received 18 thoughtful comments. Wow. Needless to...
- June 19, 2006: Why do search analytics continue to be so rarely used?
- We're wondering: at a time when both user experience design and web analytics are taking off, why do so few people analyze their local site's searches? This doesn't really make sense, does it? Or does it? Have a theory? Please...
- June 16, 2006: How del.icio.us is this site?
- It's always interesting to pop into del.icio.us and see how many users are bookmarking a site (say, this one), and how they're tagging it. As of right now, 16 people have tagged this site. Good? Bad? Hard to say at...
- June 08, 2006: 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...
