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

[Isabel Danforth]

We use picosearch - also a free indexing tool.  It allows up to 1500 pages 
I believe and provides us  with the search terms that are used the 
most.  Recently it has added some more  reports.  One thing that I like is 
that it allows us to have 3 entry points, so we index our public librayr 
web page (russelllibrary.org) as well as the town and public school web pages.

Isabel

At 01:02 PM 2/18/2002 -0800, David Merchant wrote:
>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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