Matt, Beyond the points Stephen and Aengus made, I'm not sure from your message that you're thinking about the INTSEARCHENGINE report in a meaningful way. This tells you nothing at all about how anyone finds your site, but can reveal things about their behavior once they get there. Analyzing the SEARCHENGINE report can tell you something about what keywords on your web site are corresponding with words users are typing in on various search engines. You only get info on people who start on that search engine and are led to your site. And of course, it tells you nothing about people who might have been looking for info your site contains, but didn't find it.
The INTSEARCHENGINE report, on the other hand, offers no info on how people find your site, but can tell you a fair amount about their way of looking for things once they get there, regardless of whether those searches provide them with helpful results. For instance, if none of the top ten internal search phrases used are showing up in your home page navigation, you might want to reconsider your navigation scheme. Or, if the most commonly used phrases deliver unhelpful results, you might want to work with that. (The INTSEARCHENGINE report can also be used for purposes entirely unconnected with searches of any kind, but that's another subject.) Basically, SEARCHENGINE provides info similar to the search engine reports other analysis tools provide, and there's no reason to look to INTSEARCHENGINE for that sort of information. Additionally, when you speak of visitors clicking back to, for instance, Google's search results, I think there's a pretty good chance their next click will be to some other site entirely--if your site was what they were looking for on google, my guess is they're more likely to move forward than backward. If you don't have many INTSEARCHENGINE hits in comparison with INTSEARCHENGINE hits, the most likely explanation is that not many people are using your internal search engine. Which is fine, as long as they're finding what they need on your site in some manner. james ============================================ James Riemermann MN Office of Tourism 651/297-2077 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For travel info: www.exploreminnesota.com ============================================ >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/21/02 09:46AM >>> Hi, I've got Analog 5.24 working just great including the INTSEARCHENGINE function but thought it important to point out an interesting anomaly to note. INTSEARCHENGINE reviews the actual URL passed whereas SEARCHENGINE reviews the referring URL. This has a curious but expected result when reviewing the statistics. One thing to remember, is that when someone searches your site, they may be presented with several hits. If they click on a link, they get directed to the page in the search list, this causes a line to be logged in your site log. For external hits, this causes a search word and search query hit, if the user clicks back and clicks another link into your site, you get another line since it reviews the referring URL in the log. For internal searches, you get a single hit for the initial search query, but no extra hits for clicks to subsequent pages, clicking back and clicking another result gives extra log lines, but since it's not reviewing the referring URL, no extra search word hits. The net effect is that the internal searches yield very few results, whereas the external search can ramp up many times the number of results when in reality, it could be just a single search. Difficult to say what is right or wrong here, should analog try to amalgamate results from outside search engines to counter the extra hits? Any comments? Matt +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | This is the analog-help mailing list. To unsubscribe from this | mailing list, go to | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/unsubscribe.html | | List archives are available at | http://www.mail-archive.com/analog-help@;lists.isite.net/ | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/archives/ | http://www.tallylist.com/archives/index.cfm/mlist.7 +------------------------------------------------------------------------ +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | This is the analog-help mailing list. To unsubscribe from this | mailing list, go to | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/unsubscribe.html | | List archives are available at | http://www.mail-archive.com/analog-help@;lists.isite.net/ | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/archives/ | http://www.tallylist.com/archives/index.cfm/mlist.7 +------------------------------------------------------------------------
