Column Two

Chiara Fox has written a checklist of items to include in search results pages. To quote: Recently on projects I’ve found myself designing a number of search results pages. While each project has its own set of requirements and nuances, I think there are a handful of elements that should ...

Kas Thomas has raised some questions about the value of best bests in a search engine. To quote: Not everyone thinks the "best bets" mechanism is a good idea. The problem is that, fundamentally, it's a hack. It's arguably the worst kind of hack in that it involves serious amounts ...

Avi Rappoport has written about "search tools junk". To quote: Search logs contain a lot of weird things, and some of them can have a significant effect on search log analysis. Having looked at tens of thousand lines of search log entries, I offer this first attempt at defining some ...

Sara Yirrell reports on a results of a survey into search satisfaction, conducted by an enterprise search vendor. To quote: According to the results, 59 per cent of workers questioned said the search tools provided by their company were either poor or very poor. In addition, 46 per cent said ...

Steve Arnold has written an article on a 12-step program for implementing search. To quote: Step 2. You need to know a great deal about the content you plan to index. You want to know how much content you must index; how much change occurs in the content; how much ...

Louis Rosenfeld has written an article on site search analytics. To quote: Knowing what keywords users enter to search in Google, Yahoo! or other web-wide search engines to reach your site is incredibly valuable. It also enables you to fine-tune a keyword ad campaign; perhaps, a campaign that could be ...

Peter Morville has brought together a collection of search patterns. To quote: I'm working on a new book (and talk) about the future of search, and I've created a seed collection of patterns and examples to support my research.

John Ferrara has written an article on improving enterprise search. To quote: Quality search results only come about through applied effort, requiring in particular the skills of an information architect. And IAs must be ready to go well beyond their traditional front-end role, digging into the functional backend and source ...

MarketingSherpa has posted an interview with Martin White on how to improve site search. To quote: Getting search right is critical to reaching your customers and prospects, but the challenge isn't limited to commercial search engines. The most important searches are often the ones users perform on your own website. MarketingSherpa ...

MarketingSherpa has posted an interview with Martin White on how to improve site search. To quote: Getting search right is critical to reaching your customers and prospects, but the challenge isn't limited to commercial search engines. The most important searches are often the ones users perform on your own website. MarketingSherpa ...

Rich Wiggins and Lou Rosenfeld have published the slides from their talk on search analytics at the IA Summit. To quote: 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 ...

Avi Rappoport has written an article on search suggestions (aka "best bets"). To quote: Search suggestion systems complement search engine results with human judgement, providing links to specific landing pages for common search terms where the algorithmic results may be confusing or unavailable. (For more information, see my Search Suggestions ...

Rich Wiggins has published details on seasonal search patterns at a large university. To quote: 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 ...

Jared Spool has written a blog entry discussing BBC results on search, extending the discussion with his own research results. To quote: No results are the worst offenders. When studying users using on-site Search, we saw, when shopping for clothes, they abandoned their shopping 55% of the time queries returned ...

Jared Spool has written a blog entry on identifying trigger words from search logs. To quote: Our research has shown that on most (not all) sites, only about 14% of search queries are issued from the home page. The vast majority of queries come after visiting lower level pages, ...

We've started getting some positive feedback on our recently-released Improving Intranet Search report, which is always nice: As James observes in the introduction to this 115 page report, the inadequacies of search may be doom an intranet as a whole to failure. After all, if staff can't find information on ...

Thanks to Google, intranet users expect to be able to type in a word (or two) and find the page they are looking for, preferably in the first few results. This is not an unreasonable expectation. At the most fundamental level, search on an intranet is supposed to make ...

Let's face it, search sucks in most organisations. But could it really be any other way, as things current stand? Taking a step back for the moment, the question is worth asking: even if an organisation is committed to delivering a good search experience, exactly how are they going to achieve ...

Just a quick reminder that it's only about 3 weeks until the free afternoon session on Improving Intranet Search, being held in Sydney on 31 August 2005. We've had over 65 registrations so far, and expect to meet (or exceed) 100 participants on the day. If so, that would make ...

Lou Rosenfeld has written a blog entry on search log analysis. To quote: Search log analysis (SLA) is a rational attempt to make sense of these distributions by focusing on those most popular queries. Finding patterns among the popular queries helps us determine how to best allocate resources for improving ...

Andrew Swartz has written a brief article outlining some guidelines for effective search on sites. To quote: On the web, people love to search . . . which is why it

Martin Belam has written an article on fine-tuning enterprise search, based on his presentation at the recent Online Information conference. To quote: The result of this is the necessity to fine tune your enterprise search system once it has been implemented. You may imagine that to fix this you need ...

CMS Watch has just announced the launch of a new product: Enterprise Search Report. To quote: Written by longtime search guru Steve Arnold, the Report provides a comprehensive overview of enterprise search solution providers and best practices. The bulk of the report entails 10- to 20-page comparative evaluations of 28 ...

Jeffrey Veen has written an article on fixing your search engine. To quote: Our finding, not surprisingly, is that almost every site's search engine could use improvement. We also found that most organizations' Web teams couldn't really affect the quality of their search results -- they were stuck tweaking search ...

OneStat has published statistics on the number of words entered into search engines. The results at a glance: 2 word phrases 32.58% 3 word phrases 25.61% 1 word phrases 19.02% 4 word phrases 12.83% 5 word phrases 5.64% 6 word phrases 2.32% 7 word phrases 0.98% [Thanks to Ease.]

Tim Bray has written another of his excellent entries on search, this time on result ranking. To quote: If you're searching a big database, unless you're lucky you're usually going to get a lot more matches to any given query than you want to look through. So it really matters ...