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.

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.

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.

Martin Belam’s taking the “Ooh” out of Google

Martin Belam today started a series about getting site search right. By way of a teaser he argues that whilst the world goes to Google, there are “plenty of things you can do” to make site search valuable. Next episode is “what you can achieve by hooking your CMS up to a search engine”. Do I hear metadata?

Lords Committee on Government Communications

Teresa Perchard and Fiona Munroe from the Citizens Advice Bureau gave evidence at the Lords Committee on Government Communications today.

Interesting comments on the difficulty of finding good information about new government entitlements and obligations and also that the channel shift to online can be disempowering for some. The digitally excluded may find it hard to get the information or need to rely on others to get it, whereas they could be independent with a printed leaflet. Also if you’re needing to negotiate with your employer or council, something printed off the internet looks less official than a printed leaflet.

At minute 30 on the video, Fiona Munroe talks about Directgov, saying she was impressed with its presentation, accessible language and useful links.

I was delighted to hear she found Directgov’s search quite easy to use, saying it offered quite meaningful lists with headings and descriptions, unlike many government websites.

She also pointed out some perceived shortcomings – that some information was fragmented, still reflecting fragmented systems in government and a lack of detail where there were differences between England and the Devolved Assemblies.

AND or OR

I’ve just re-found this note that a former colleague wrote. A useful reference point.

The basic premise is if you do an ‘OR’ then you get the ‘and’ results at the top and the ‘OR’ results follow them with lower relevancy as they only have one of the words. This then allows you to maybe get a decent result returned even if there are no results with both words in the search.

Consider a search for “money euro emu bank of England”, with an ‘and’ search you would not get back results which contain 4 of the 5 words in the query term, and there may well not be any docs with all 5 words in. So if this were an ‘and’ search by default then basic search would not give you back any docs even though some may be highly relevant to the person searching. The person searching in this example has tried to be as helpful as possible by giving lots of words that are relevant to the kind of doc he is looking for probably without intending to restrict his search.

If you look at it from the other point of view then why would you do an ‘and’ search as the basic search instead of an ‘or’ search? The only argument I have heard is that it doesn’t clutter results with ‘or’ docs and doesn’t give back as many docs so is less likely to confuse the user. I don’t understand this because if you trust the search engine and the algorithms behind it then the relevancy will sort everything so that all the ‘and’ docs that have all words in the doc returned will be at the top of the results when doing an ‘or’ search anyway because all words hit so gets a higher score than if only one or two words hit. If you do a search using Google you will be returned umpteen million docs but its not confusing because the relevancy algorithm sorts them so that the most relevant docs are in the top 10 based on all words in the query term hitting and hitting most frequently.

Google search within a site made easier for navigational searches

On Wednesday, we noticed Google was starting to surface a search within box for some results for navigational searches:

It turns out it’s a wider roll-out by Google as the Official Google blog reports.

“However, one of the trends we noticed while studying teleporting was that there were lots of searchers who would type the name of a specific website as if they wanted to teleport, but would then immediately issue another more a refined search within this site.

Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.”

The last sentence is interesting. We’ve certainly noticed a wide implementation across UK government websites.

RSS feeds for search results

I did a web search for ‘RSS feeds for search results’ and found a Live Search blog entry dating from 1995 that talks about the alpha feature of providing RSS feeds from search results: just add ‘&format=rss’ to the URL of the results and copy the full URL into your RSS Reader.

This still works on the main Live search site and is made easier by just clicking on the orange RSS icon in the URL. Here’s the ‘RSSed’ URL for Flooding information from the UK government: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=flooding+site%3agov.uk&format=rss

Very nifty, but interestingly, Live don’t seem to draw users’ attention to it or even provide information in Help.

Yahoo! offers the similar features to Live, with different syntax, but the RSS icon.

In contrast, Google only offers RSS feeds (RSS and Atom) for its news results but does publicise it clearly. Similarly, the BBC offers RSS of its news and sports results.

Other web search engines such as Ask, Exalead and Clusty do not appear to offer RSS at all.