Thanks guys, I understand completely what you are saying and James, yes you are right in that what I'm getting out of this is a way of improving keywords etc. However, I'm try to correlate the searches used to find the best blend of keywords, and which pages to place keywords on for external searches, and make the vistors on the site see the information easily without needing internal searches. Visitors coming from searches outside are giving keyword hits a hammering, however, when I look at internal searches, very few keywords are hit in fact the search results seem to run at about 3-5% of the numbers from the outside searches. Even though the search page is actually hit more times than we get referring visits.
For me, the perfect solution would be for Analog to amalgamate the search results by ignoring search requests where the refering URL and IP are the same. This would reduce the external search word count down to a more realistic figure. Interesting that Aengus pointed out the internal search can be treated as external. In fact, I already have a similar entry in the SEARCHENGINE param that does this. What I actually do at present, is run analog twice. Once with the internal search included in the SEARCHENGINE list, once with just the internal search in the SEARCHENGINE list. This at least gives me the correlation between what's searched internally and externally on an even par. It also let's me get an idea of the factor of difference between the INTSEARCHENGINE results and the SEARCHENGINE results which is where I derived the 3-5% from. Thanks for the comments, I only got into Analog about 3-4 months ago, taking over the responsibilty from another member of staff and have made some fairly important discoveries on our site as a result. Probably one of the easiest tools out there to use and just love the computer readable output format. Matt -----Original Message----- From: James Riemermann [mailto:James.Riemermann@;state.mn.us] Sent: 21 October 2002 21:35 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [analog-help] INTSEARCHENGINE Inconsistency 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. 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