Search Analytics Case Studies

Presented by John Ferrara, Information Architect, Vanguard
This presentation will describe two methods developed at our organization for quantitatively measuring the quality of a website's search engine results using data readily available in search logs.  The first is a quick and easy relevancy test that yields concise, bottom-line scores of how reliably the search engine returns the best matches first.  The second is a more advanced and insightful evaluation of the results' precision -- the proportion of relevant and irrelevant matches clustered at the top of the results.  The presentation will describe how to repeat the methods at any organization, and make available spreadsheets for automatically processing gathered data.  It will also describe which solutions can rectify problems found in the evaluation.

This presentation will be of greatest interest to user experience professionals who want to improve the quality of a search engine's results and need a reliable and credible means of tracking its performance.

Presented by Miles Kehoe, President of New Idea Engineering, Inc.
Interpreting Your Search Activity Reports

Your search engine is the ultimate business intelligence tool. Click tracking tells you what your visitors looked at and what links they follow, but it doesn't tell you what they were looking for. You're stuck trying to infer intent from navigation. But when a visitor does a search, he is telling you what he is looking for. Are you listening?  This talk takes a look at the reports you should be monitoring, and what each of them can tell you about your customer, your web site, and your company. Activity reports have a gold mine of information.