[WEB4LIB] How are people using your "Site Search"?

[David Merchant]

At 11:52 AM 2/18/2002 -0800, Blake Carver wrote:
>Is anyone else is keeping a log of what search terms people are entering in
>your "Site Search". I recall a "how to" thread a few weeks back, but I

Been using the free search from http://search.atomz.com for couple of years 
now, been rather satisfied with it. It's free for sites under a certain 
number of documents, I forget how much, just that our main Library site is 
below the cut-off. Couldn't set up another account to use it to search the 
Unix help pages being mirrored, as that section was too large, but that's 
fine with me. Anway, it gives weekly email reports of what keywords are 
being used by our patrons. The email report lists the top 5 searches for 
that week, with a link to get all the words used for searching for that 
week, plus daily, weekly, and monthly stats.

>I've been keeping track here at OSU for a few months now, and there is no
>doubt in my mind people are NOT differentiating between a site search and a
>search of our OPAC, or a database search.

Same here. Was especially bad at the beginning.

>I changed our search screen to state explicitly that our site search is not
>looking for books, etc... about a month ago, and it doesn't seem to have
>helped.

I did the same, and my first attempt at putting up a disclaimer helped 
some, just a little, not much. I then moved to having the text in 
<BIG><BIG> and <B>. Even have stooped to using a DHTML script (which 
browser snifs) to alternate the color of the disclaimer text as well to 
help get more attention. It's set off in a table with a thick colored 
border and white background to have it show up even better. I got some 
improvement in the search logs. Now in the top 5 searches, the last couple 
or three keyword(s) used would actually be related to the library web site: 
someone looking for Infotrac for instance, or library hours. I don't think 
any web site related search terms ever made the top two, but at least the 
third most used or fourth and fifth most used terms are library site 
related. Much improvement. I'll live with it. It ain't pretty, but it 
works: http://www.latech.edu/tech/library/search.htm

TTFN,
David

Head, Systems Dept, Louisiana Tech University
merchant at latech.edu
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