Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
How would you define a succes reate of searches? We log search requests too. For starters, given a search and results, does the user look at them or immediately submit a different but related search? If you look at a set of search results, do they seem to be related or disparate? I haven't looked to see if there are any automated tools that help. I could imagine automatically looking for a sequence of searches that are successively refined (e.g. search for word1, then search for word1 and word2), but that wouldn't find related word searches (e.g. search for "categories" then search for "vocabularies").
I'm sure there's more around this. I just know enough to be dangerous, i.e., I know that search facilities are used heavily at many types of sites, and therefore they are an extremely important feature (perhaps the most important part of any product-oriented web site), but I haven't looked much at what makes a search facility good or bad. Gary