Frankie,
You've done more than a lot of people have done in looking at your
search logs. When i looked at the Guggenheims's -- as a prototype
for some steve data analysis -- i did a literature search and
couldn't find any serious studies of museum searching [this really
surprised me, btw.]
Each collection is likely to have its own patterns: in this modern
art museum 63% of the most common searches (searched 10 or more
times) were for artists' names.
Amazingly about 25% of the searches of this collection produced no
result [in an age of millions of results elsewhere, this is a real
problem].
Looking at the search failures:
- 36% were caused by spelling errors, so "did you mean..."
would really help.
- 50% of the unsuccessful artist name searches were caused
by spelling errors.
The paper, and a blog post with more detail, are at
http://conference.archimuse.com/blog/jtrant/searching_museum_collections_on_line_what_do_peo
Since search is a favourite navigation mechanism we really do need to
pay more attention to it, both on and now off museum sites.
/jt
At 3:46 PM +0000 3/28/08, frankie roberto wrote:
> > The most likely impact for us is in upcoming modifications to our own
>> search.
>
>...
>
>> Do we give up, and acknowledge
>> that doing search in any way different from Google is a) now competing more
>> directly with them, and b) probably just getting more confusing for most
>> visitors; or do we focus on these (probably fewer and fewer) visitors who
>> come to our search expecting it to work just the way it should, not the way
>> that's easiest?
>
>Hmm, very interesting point.
>
>I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that we spend far far less time
>looking at our search interface than we ought to. Our site search is
>powered by a Google Mini, and other than providing thumbnails object
>pages returned, it's pretty much working in its out-of-the-box
>configuration. We haven't invested any time in editorially 'promoting'
>results for certain search terms, for instance, or in setting up
>synonyms.
>
>In fact, this discussion has prompted me to do a quick report of the
>most popular search terms, which are:
>
>1. games - 1,1012
>2. grain strain (old game) - 498
>3. jobs - 488
>4. wroughton (object storage site) - 474
>5. search - 447 (amusing this is the default search text, so
>represents people pressing search without typing anything)
>6. launchball - 280
>7. opening times - 252 (shockingly, this doesn't return anything
>hugely useful, and so 11% try refining their search)
>8. bbc micro - 202 (in the news recently, but only returns press releases)
>9. builder - 192 (no idea what this is about)
>10. energy - 150 (presumably teachers looking for energy microsite)
>
>This data is for the last month, and was gathered by the excellent
>'site serch' function which can be set up in Google Analytics (which
>allows you to monitor search terms, regardless of which search
>technology you use).
>
>Generally, I site search seems to be hugely neglected by website
>owners (mea culpa), which is presumably why people are turning to
>Google more and more.
>
>Frankie
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J. Trant jtrant at archimuse.com
Partner & Principal Consultant phone: +1 416 691 2516
Archives & Museum Informatics fax: +1 416 352 6025
158 Lee Ave, Toronto
Ontario M4E 2P3 Canada http://www.archimuse.com
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