We all know that anything to do with search is hot these days.
And now the smart companies are starting to take a closer look at the search engines on their own sites.
Whether you call this “site search” or “internal search” or ‘who-knows-what’ search, I predict this area is going to see a lot of excitement and evolution in the next few years.
I recently completed a fascinating site search consulting project for a large media company. Since they publish a number of magazines, they have a vast content archive and a vested interest in making it as easy as possible for Website visitors to be able to get to their content as efficiently as possible.
My company was hired to help the media company understand how to improve their site search. During the course of the project, my colleagues and I developed an unofficial list of what we started to refer to as “Site Search Best Practices.” These best practices are independent of any one particular site search system (i.e., the technology solution) and will be of benefit to any company, large or small, that is implementing site search.
So, without much further ado, here are some of our Site Search Best Practices:
Month: November 2005
Torcamp is this weekend in Toronto. David Crow is instigating, Jon Lax is hosting, and loads of interesting people have already signed on to attend.
Find out what Torcamp is, see who’s going to be there, and sign yourself up today…
_This article is by Guest Contributor Marc Poirer._
According to “PEW’s recent survey of Internet usage”:http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_SearchData_1105.pdf (links to PDF), search is now the second most popular Internet activity, edging towards email as the primary Internet application.
Search usage jumped dramatically from 30% of American Internet users in June 2004 to 41% in September of 2005.