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Site Search Analytics: A Conversation with Lou Rosenfeld

Added on 18 July 2011 Peter Bogaards
Adding some more buzz to the launch.

“Lou Rosenfeld’s newest book, Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations with Your Customers, has been the subject of more prelaunch buzz than most UX books have gotten this year. It seemed everyone was tweeting, talking, or speculating about it before the ink had even had a chance to dry. And, true to the hype, this book delivers in spades. If you read one book this year to hone your craft, add value to your UX practice, or enable you to help your clients, this is the one! Lou recently found some time in his very hectic schedule to sit down and talk with me about his book and the burgeoning practice of site search analytics (SSA).”

(Kristina Mausser a.k.a. @krismausser ~ UXmatters)

A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search

Added on 12 July 2011 Peter Bogaards
“To design better search and discovery experiences we must understand the complexities of the human-information seeking process. Numerous theoretical frameworks have been proposed to characterize this complex process, notably the standard model, the cognitive model and the dynamic model. In addition, others have investigated search as a strategic process, examining the various problem solving strategies and tactics that information seekers employ over extended periods of time. In this paper, we examine the needs and behaviours of varied individuals across a range of search and discovery scenarios within various types of enterprise. These are based on an analysis of the scenarios derived from numerous engagements involving the development of search and business intelligence solutions utilizing the Endeca Latitude software platform. In so doing, we extend the classic IR concept of information-seeking to a broader notion of discovery-oriented problem solving, accommodating the much wider range of behaviours required to fulfil the typical goals and objectives of enterprise knowledge workers.”

(Tony Russell-Rose a.k.a. @tonygrr ~ Information Interaction) – courtesy of jameskalbach

Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations With Your Customers

Added on 6 July 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.”

(Louis Rosenfeld a.k.a. @louisrosenfeld ~ Rosenfeld Media)

Are SEO practitioners the digital equivalent of bankers?

Added on 1 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“When I think about the banking industry, I’m reminded of the world of Search Engine Marketing. They too are trying to find weaknesses in a set of rules designed to level the playing field, in order to create a competitive advantage for their clients. It’s just that rather than these rules being laid down by central government, they have been developed in the labs at Google.” (Andy Budd ~ Blogography)

Lou Rosenfeld On Search Analytics

Added on 7 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“So one thing I encourage people to do is to try to categorise the data in other words gee it seems like there is a lot of queries here about physical places, maybe our organisation has different offices or campuses or different buildings, look for things that seem to be people or different topics that emerge what you start doing is that you force yourself to get very close to the way users are thinking because you are looking at what their needs are, and actually it is a good way of looking at what sort of metadata your site ought to have and what kinds of content type people seem to be asking for and it might even help you do things like prioritise your next content migration because you start getting a sense of what are the really important content types that people seem to be requesting when they are searching so there are other things which you might delve into.” (Boagworld)

Beyond Findability: Search-Enhanced IA for Content-Intensive RIAs

Added on 1 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This paper details a way to extend classic information architecture for web-based applications. The goal is to enhance traditional user experiences, mainly based on navigation or search, to new ones (also relevant for stakeholders’ requirements). Examples are sense making, at a glance understanding, playful exploration, serendipitous browsing, and brand communication. These new experiences are often unmet by current information architecture solutions, which may be stiff and difficult to scale, especially in the case of large or very large websites. A heavy reliance upon search engines seems not to offer a viable solution: it supports, in fact, a limited range of user experiences. We propose to transform (parts of) websites into Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), based, beside other features, upon interaction-rich interfaces and semantic browsing across content. We introduce SEE-IA (SEarch-Enhanced Information Architecture), a coherent set of information architecture design strategies, which innovatively blend and extend IA and search paradigms.” (Spagnolo, L., Bolchini, D., Paolini, P., & Di Blas, N. ~ Journal of Information Architecture No. 3)

Innovation at Google: The physics of data

Added on 31 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Today, we measure the size of the Web in exabytes and are uploading to it 15 times more data than we were 3 years ago. Technologies for sensing, storing, and sharing information are driving innovation in the tools available to help us understand our world in greater detail and accuracy than ever before. The implications of analyzing data on a massive scale transcend the tech industry, impacting the environmental sector, social justice issues, health and science research, and more. When coupled with astute technical insight, data is dynamic, accessible, and ultimately, creative.” (Marissa Mayer)

Understanding the Cost of We Can’t Find Anything

Added on 21 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“One problem I often hear when talking with any organization about new solutions is understanding the cost and inefficiency of their existing way solutions, processes, or general way of doing things. In the past year or two I have used various general measurements around search to help focus the need for improvement not only on search, but the needed information and metadata needed to improve search.” (Thomas Vander Wal)

Findability and Exploration: The future of search

Added on 4 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The majority of people visiting a news website don’t care about the front page. They might have reached your site from Google while searching for a very specific topic. They might just be wandering around. Or they’re visiting your site because they’re interested in one specific event that you cover. This is big. It changes the way we should think about news websites.” (Stijn Debrouwere) courtesy of petermorville

In Search of Novel Ways to Design Large Cultural Web Sites

Added on 4 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In this paper, we illustrate how Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), combining lightweight information architecture with advanced search paradigms (like faceted search) and interactive visualization strategies, can be used to better support a number of communication goals. The examples are taken from the new Web site for the Directorate General of Antiquity of the Italian Ministry for Culture Heritage (to become public in Autumn 2010), where both a huge amount of content (the Italian archeological heritage) and a variety of users’ profiles (from scholars to amateurs and tourists) are managed.” (Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas, and Luigi Spagnolo ~ Museums And The Web 2010) courtesy of petermorville

Search Patterns is Customer Behavior and Business Insights

Added on 27 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
Interview with Peter Morville about his new book Search Patterns – “(…) I’m a skeptic when it comes to grand visions of The Semantic Web. In narrow domains such as medicine, we can develop thesauri (or ‘ontologies’) that define terms precisely and map hierarchical, equivalent, and associative relationships. But these approaches simply don’t scale, and they can’t keep up with the rapid evolution of language and knowledge.” (Bridgeline Digital)

Designing Mobile Search: Turning Limitations into Opportunities

Added on 8 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Thinking of porting your Web finding experience to iPhone, Android, or Windows Mobile? Just forget about the fact that these devices are basically full-featured computers with tiny screens. Having gone through this design exercise a few times, I have realized that designing a great mobile finding experience requires a way of thinking that is quite different from our typical approach to designing search for Web or desktop applications. To put it simply, designing a mobile finding experience requires thinking in terms of turning limitations into opportunities. In this column, I’ll discuss some of the limitations of mobile platforms, as well as the opportunities they afford, and share a few design ideas that might come in handy for your own projects.” (Greg Nudelman – UXmatters)

Search is the Web’s fun and wicked problem

Added on 22 February 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Search is the Web’s most powerful and frustrating tool. It’s the conduit to unfathomable amounts of information, yet it requires a fair degree of user education to reach its full potential. It’s odd that something so important is so hard to harness. And it’s not going to get easier anytime soon. We may think of search as static and mature because we’ve used those ubiquitous boxes for years. But it’s a tool in flux. Developments in mobile, augmented reality, and social graphs — to name a few — signal big changes ahead.” (Mac Slocum – O’Reilly Radar)

Browse Is The New Black

Added on 8 February 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Search, search, search. Everyone is talking about search these days. Bing, semantic search, site search. That’s all you hear. Don’t get me wrong: search is wildly important to our daily experiences on the web. I’ve written a bit on search on this blog. (…) But at the same time were seeing a lot of new products and interfaces that offer enhanced online browsing experiences. Browsing it totally underrated, I believe. What’s more, looking broadly across human information behavior, we see that browsing is more than an accident, impulsive activity–it’s not just aimless surfing.” (James Kalbach – Experiencing Information)

Workshop on Search and Social Media

Added on 4 February 2010 Peter Bogaards
“It is my pleasure to report on the 3rd Annual Workshop on Search in Social Media, a gathering of information retrieval and social media researchers and practitioners in an area that has captured the interest of computer scientists, social scientists, and even the broader public.” (Daniel Tunkelang)

Search Patterns

Added on 1 February 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. This provocative and inspiring book explores design patterns that apply across the categories of web, e-commerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real time search and discovery. Using colorful illustrations and examples, the authors bring modern information retrieval to life, covering such diverse topics as relevance ranking, faceted navigation, multi-touch, and mixed reality. Search Patterns challenges us to invent the future of discovery while serving as a practical guide to help us make search applications better today.” (Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender)