Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

COMMENTARY to you A LOOK AT THE VALUE OF THE TOP 100 SEARCH TERMS BY AVI RAPPOPORT your users are talking i f you have a search engine, you should have search logs. And if you have search logs, you should have access to a periodic report on the most frequently used search terms. (Some older search engines have extremely limited logging and reporting, but you can write scripts or import them into databases and generate search reports that way.) All the search term frequency reports I’ve seen fall into the same pattern, with a high number of queries for frequent search terms quickly trailing off into unique terms. I have found that the top 100 search terms provide a good idea of what people are looking for with your search engine. (Note that you do need a statistically significant number of search terms to make this work, so if your search only gets a few thousand searches a week, do your analysis over a month or two.) This curve may look familiar—it’s the Long Tail, as popularized by Chris Anderson’s book of the same name. The curve is more shallow for online bookstores and other sites with a high percentage of “known item” searches (such as title or author), while informational and research search engines have a steeper curve and higher proportion of unique search terms. Infrequent terms demonstrate the point at which a free-text search engine—with dynamic automatic indexing system and content-independent relevance ranking—shines. As Anderson points out, search provides customer access to market niches, explaining much of the success of Amazon and Netflix, among others. The Long Tail is interesting, and there are many things to learn from it. However, for search analysis, the place to start is the “Short Head”: the most common search terms, used by hundreds of people on your search engine. While many top search terms are single words, a high proportion tend to be phrases, where the user is looking for a specific thing and is willing to type its entire name. This indicates that the search engine relevance heuristics should recognize 16 ENTERPRISE SEARCH SOURCEBOOK 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Publisher’s Note Findings and Figures Why Enterprise Search Will Never Be Google-y Searching for Search Usability Your Users Are Talking to You What’s Your Search Story? Search Is Dead—Now What? Delivering on the Promise of Enterprise Search Taming Multiple Search Engines in Your Organization Enterprise Search: Trends for 2008 Enterprise Search Seen From the Inside Open Source Search: Elixir or Poison? Avoiding the Big Mistakes in Search Semantic Search Takes Root in the Enterprise E-Discovery Essentials: The Rules You Need to Know SharePoint Search: An Enterprise Contender? Integrating Security Into Your Enterprise Search Infrastructure Engineering a Better Search Infrastructure Letting End Users Ask the Questions, Stat! The Power of Knowledge Legal Research Using Enterprise Search: A Developer’s View From Treading Water to Full Steam Ahead Pulling Out All the Stops With Midas A Natural Search Solution An Incremental Approach to Improving Enterprise Search The Enterprise Search Sourcebook Showcase Directory Index to Advertisers and Companies Mentioned

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