|
COPYRIGHT 2003 Information Today, Inc.
No doubt about it: A good intranet search engine is a, maybe the, critical service to offer users. But have you thought about its value to the Webmaster? No, not for searching per se, but as a monitoring tool. Search query log reports shed light on how employees are using your intranet. You can discover what's in demand today and what topics are waning or gaining in popularity; it's your individual intranet zeitgeist. Search log analysis can offer insights into employees' expectations about intranet content and services. Another nugget of gold to mine from search logs is employees' own words for key concepts.
Analysis of search engine data is instrumental in helping you improve your intranet. There are four key ways that you can make use of the data gathered from your search engine:
* Content synopsis
* Site search performance
* Intranet usability
* "Best bets"
Search engines typically generate two types of data files that can be analyzed. As the search engine robot crawls the intranet, it records the URLs and files that it indexes, the number of terms, and so on. The second type of file is similar to a Web server access log. The search query log file typically stores the date, time, and search strings entered.
In the event that your search engine doesn't produce a query log data file, you may still be able to glean some information from the referrer portion of your Web server logs. If searchers follow a link from the search results screen, their query terms often show up in the referrer in the Web server log. With just a few minutes of setup, savvy Web log reporting tools can create a special report showing term frequencies for a single search engine. The caveat of using referrer data is that unsuccessful searches, where the user didn't click on any of the results, are not recorded.
CONTENT SYNOPSIS
For many distributed intranets containing documents on dozens or hundreds of servers, your search engine is the best tool for a bird's eye view of the breadth and depth of the content. Some spiders will generate a brief report indicating types and number of documents indexed, number of words identified and added to the index, bad links or URLs, and secure of password-controlled areas. In some cases, it will indicate if the content changed from the previous visit or not, showing how many pages are revised month to month. Swish-e (Simple Web Indexing System for Humans-Enhanced), a free search engine [www.swish-e.org] with a GNU General Public License arrangement, will...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
