Site search analytics

Attended a workshop led by Louis Rosenfeld today on site search analytics. Great to spend the day with Louis and other like minded people. After years of banging on about the value of analysing site metrics it was a validating experience and time well spent.

I came away with:

• some very useful tools to look at patterns, points of failure and sampling sessions
• ways of applying insight to
  • metadata and navigation enhancements
  • Improving content
  • Improving search

Also interesting discussions about the power of data to inform UX and quantifying search performance. And how there’s a disconnect between organisational KPIs (measuring what the business wants to measure) vs. opportunities to gain insight from for ‘guerilla’ measurement.

RDFa implementation on UK Civil Service job search

A very useful primer on a job search RDFa, by Mark Birkbeck, who wrote it.

Although I couldn’t replicate any Yahoo! examples, for those interested, if you have a Yahoo! account you can download this Structured data display add-on to Yahoo! search:

When Yahoo! finds any structured data it is displayed in the results – see attachment.

So at least we have proof that a generic web search engine can parse the data.

Nielsen and initial text

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox reviews a test of how well users understand the first 11 characters of a website’s links and headlines.

“Why test text that’s so severely truncated? Because online reading is often dominated by the F-pattern. That is, people read the first few listed items somewhat thoroughly — thus the cross-bars of the “F” — but read less and less as they continue down the list, eventually passing their eyes down the text’s left side in a fairly straight line. At this point, users see only the very beginning of the items in a list.”

Participants were shown truncated (11 character) links, one at a time, and were asked to predict what they’d find if they clicked on the link – they had  the site’s name and a brief site description for additional context. Then particpants were given a task and asked to pick the relevant link from a list of 10 truncated links, 9 of which were distracters.

He cites a Directgov example of a page title/link, Working while you study: paying tax, as performing badly.

So, some thoughts:

1. I’d definitely agree with front loading links and titles to get the keywords up front, and advise colleagues to do this. But surely users scan, looking for relevancy and context, so how useful is this test?
2. In the Directgov example there are three concepts:
   • working
   • studying
   • tax

OK, it is a bit complicated, but the usefulness of the article is about the context of all three – do you have to pay tax when your working but studying too. I don’t think there’s a quick fix, but clearly the most important context is studying. So here’s my suggestion:

Student tax – do you need to pay if you work?

Any better suggestions?

Crowd sourcing ups and downs

In the same week that Microsoft announces the closure of Encarta, Jimmy Wales announces that Wikia Search is closing the doors on 31 March.

Microsoft says that whilst “Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years,… the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.”  And the biggest change to encyclopeidias in recent years is, of course, crowd sourced.

On the other hand, a later child of Jimmy Wales, Wiki Search, is closing. With low volumes and revenues it just hasn’t made the impact Wales was predicting. And, of course, Google now offers SearchWiki, that lets logged-in users prioritize, erase, supplement, and annotate search results.

Search Directgov via IE8 and actually IE7 and Firefox

If you download Internet Explorer v8 you can use the new ‘accelerator’ feature to select some text on any web page, then right-click to access a ’search Directgov’ link which fires that word directly into the Directgov search engine as a search query. (other search engine options available).

And Simon Dickson has thoughtfully added a search plugin for Directgov, which will allow you to search Directgov directly from the browser interface.

“Visit this page on the MozDev website to find Puffbox’s brand new Directgov search plugin. Click on the word Directgov, and it’ll ask you if you want to install – say yes. If you then consult the list of search engines available from your browser’s built-in search box, you should now see a Directgov option. Enter a word, and it’ll take you straight to a search query Directgov results for that word.”

Design for your least able user – a search bot

Useful SEO basic principles from Michael Smethurst, IA at the BBC. I like it – lots of emphasis on good links and persistent URIs.

Then he’s written lots more detail here.

Good practice with URLs

A brief summary of the importance of paying attention to URL design, drawing on:

• a conversation with a search engine engineer
• URL’s for Information Architects - Silver Oliver again!
• Well Designed URLs are beautiful – Mike Shenkel
• Google’s advice on URL structure to webmasters

Make URLs persistent

Because:

• Other sites link to them
• People bookmark them
• Search engines index them

The core content for a URL should be reasonably static (home and hub pages excluded of course)

Make URLs readable by humans

• They’re not just in web address bar
• People can remember them if they’re well designed
• People can understands them if they’re well designed
• They are more meaningful
• If they are well constructed they benefit search engine optimisation

Make URLs hackable

• They expose a logical structure to the site
• Supports navigation:
  • Help users orientate in the site
  • Let’s people move up the hierarchy
• Helps people guess the address of similar resources on the site
• So:
  • Label consistently
  • Put similar resources at the same level
  • Provide meaningful content at each level of the hierarchy

The case for strong narratives

A former colleague, Silver Oliver, makes the case for web-scalable narratives. Music to my ears:

“As we build larger and larger websites it becomes increasingly difficult to scale meaningful user journeys.  Success is dependent on indentifying your key user journeys (narrative structures) and ensuring these can be dynamically populated as the site grows.”

He argues that, in contrast to tags which “help to open up new user journeys but are weak in narrative, taking the form ‘this content is about this tag’”; there is a need to think about the right primary narrative structures and to encode these user journeys into the very core of the site.

Oliver cites well known examples:

• Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought – noun (book) verb (also bought) noun (book)

• Buy it now – noun (user) verb (buy) noun (item)
• Such and such wrote on your Wall – noun (friend) verb (wrote on) noun (wall)

and goes on to suggest they can be scalable to the semantic web using ontologies and domain models.

Google Search-based Keyword Tool

Google has introduced a new Search-based Keyword Tool which generates keyword and landing page ideas that, it claims, are  “highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.”

So it provides a useful competitive analysis tool, letting you see which keywords Google thinks are relevant to a site or site section. Of course, it’s also suggesting potential keywords to bid on as Adwords and if you sign in with an Adwords account then the list is fuller and more customised.

I had a play and found quite sound suggestions for public sector sites, as the Lambeth.gov.uk example shows:

Unemployment and redundancy revisited

Robin Goad at Hitwise revisits searches for ‘redundancy’ following his first review in June, discussed by me here.

Goad notes a large increase in searches for ‘redundancy’ related terms and ‘unemployment’ related terms, but also a large increase in the range of distinct variations searched for.

Directgov is the destination for a large (and increasing*) proportion of these searches

“Over half the people searching for ‘redundancy’ (63.8%), ‘job seekers allowance’ (56.7%) and ‘unemployment benefit’ (55.1%) currently visit the government site Directgov. The five most popular employment search terms driving traffic to Directgov over the 4 weeks ending 8th November were ‘worktrain’, ‘job seekers allowance’, ‘income support’, redundancy’ and ‘job seekers allowance (sic)’.”

A search on Google for these terms gives the following results:

rank/term	redundancy	Job Seekers Allowance	unemployment benefit
Sponsored	–	Directgov	Directgov
1st	Directgov	Jobcentreplus	Working Rights
2nd	Directgov	Job Seekers Allowance	Working Rights
3rd	BERR	Directgov	DWP (PDF)
4th	BERR	DSDNI	DWP (PDF)

The two Directgov sponsored lnks show the value of including sponsored results to help users navigate. Unemployment benefit is no longer an ‘official term’ and so the natural search results from the public sector are not particularly helpful. The sponsored link points users to a helpful hub page about help and support with looking for work.

*In the period ending in June 54.6% of searches for the basic term ‘redundancy’ went to Directgov.