A brief search analytics article, “The long tail of search on guardian.co.uk” by Martin Belam, User Experience (UX) Lead & Information architect at the Guardian, that does a nice job of explaining in a non quant-jock way, how the Guardian uses enterprise search analytics and some good old-fashioned information architecture techniques to turn user search queries into insight & answers for their site.
One thing that Martin discusses that is often missed or forgotten when discussing quantitative data is the use and the benefit of “playing” with data in a qualitative nature to try to understand the intent behind a user’s query, which can help offer insights and actions on how to optimizing your content, such as improved relevancy to your enterprise search engine results, improvements to navigation, prioritization, taxonomy, metadata, and much more.
Being the nice chap that Martin he gives a little shout out to the book I worked on and wrote portions of with Lou Rosenfeld, Search Analytics For Your Site.
*This is a re-post from my earlier Insightful Analytics blog on 2010/11/07.
Marko Hurst
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