[WEB4LIB] "search our site" stats

[Blake Carver]

I probably should clarify this.
I must admit, looking at what I sent along to the list, I'd agree with you. 
Unfortunately, what I have done so far is not representative of the big 
picture.
Looking at the rest of my little project, though, tells a different story.

This list is based ONLY on terms with 4+ occurrences, which was only about 
200 terms.
There were about 810 multiple terms total (i.e. terms that were searched 
for more than once) out of 8700 total terms. So only about 10% of the total 
number of searches were repeats.

Maybe we can infer that there are some people who know what they are doing, 
and they use the same terms often, but the could all be librarians for all 
I know (yes, I can grep out IP's from the logs, but I haven't). Like I said 
before, alot more numbers to crunch here. This list could show only the 
expert users searches, something I hadn't thought about until just now.

This list is based on the most frequent terms ONLY, which is a small number 
of the total searched terms. Looking at "the rest of the story" shows me 
ALOT of people are not understanding it.
I see many single searches like this:

"a newspaper or magazine article on hammurabi"
"a peoples history of the united states"
" back ground check on the last name peebles"
"10 largest world navies"
"2002 winter olympics athletes pronunciation guide"

So, Bill, I think you're right, the users I based this list on "get it", 
there are more than a few more users that are not reflected here, and they 
don't get it.

Sorry for any confusion this may have caused, I chose my wording poorly, as 
usual.

-Blake


At 01:59 PM 3/25/2002 -0500, Drew, Bill wrote:
>Looks to me as though Blake's users understand it.  I think we can safely
>say "some people" don't make the distinction.