{"id":379,"date":"2004-08-23T11:00:59","date_gmt":"2004-08-23T15:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tradermike.net\/movethecrowd\/2004\/08\/improving_users_search_experience\/"},"modified":"2004-08-23T11:00:59","modified_gmt":"2004-08-23T15:00:59","slug":"improving_users_search_experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2004\/08\/23\/improving_users_search_experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving Users&#8217; Search Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s an interesting look at some of the <a href=\"http:\/\/oscommerce-experts.com\/oscommerce\/29.html\" title=\"Improving Your User&rsquo;s Search Experience\">habits of users while searching<\/a> for information online, complete with ideas on improving your site&#8217;s search usability.  Here are a few of the things that stood out to me (my comments are in italics):<\/p>\n<p><UL><br \/>\n<LI>Satisfaction of both casual users and the more experienced ones was reported at 42%<\/LI><br \/>\n<LI>The worst user search experiences logged were in using internal site searches rather than mega search engines. &#8211; <i>Not at all surprising.<\/i><\/LI><br \/>\n<LI>Many users avoid corporate sanctioned, internal search engines and opt instead for Web search engines to look for information outside the firewall related to their company. <\/LI><br \/>\n<LI>About 60% of search users typed in only a single word to start a search. &#8211; <em>People trip me out with their lack of search skills.  I get a good laugh almost daily by looking at some of the terms people used to get to my sites.  Unless you&#8217;re looking for a very unique word, the odds of getting usable results with just one word must be quite low.<\/em><\/LI><br \/>\n<LI>A mere 1% utilize the Advanced Search capabilities. &#8211; <em>Again, not surprising especially not after the previous note.  Perhaps we need to start offering courses in searching as continuing education or something.  (I hope that schools are already teaching kids how to search effectively.) <\/em><\/LI><br \/>\n<LI>Only 3% used quote marks or other query syntax to refine searches<\/LI><br \/>\n<LI>The first link in a search result page gets 51% of total clicks. &#8211; <em>Ah, the coveted number 1 search result placement.  That shows why it&#8217;s so important to architect your site so that it&#8217;s search engine friendly.<\/em><\/LI><br \/>\n<\/UL><\/p>\n<p>(via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mobile-weblog.com\/archives\/carnival_of_the_capitalists.html\">this week&#8217;s Carnival of the Capitalists<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s an interesting look at some of the habits of users while searching for information online, complete with ideas on improving your site&#8217;s search usability. Here are a few of the things that stood out to me (my comments are in italics): Satisfaction of both casual users and the more experienced ones was reported at&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2004\/08\/23\/improving_users_search_experience\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Improving Users&#8217; Search Experience<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7,16],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":38,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2003\/06\/29\/googles_pretty_shrewd\/","url_meta":{"origin":379,"position":0},"title":"Google&#8217;s Pretty Shrewd","date":"June 29, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Google's starting to remind me of the megalomaniac Brain, from Pinky and the Brain. They're recently made a new push into the advertising game with their AdSense program: Google AdSense is for web publishers who want to make more revenue from advertising on their site while maintaining editorial quality. AdSense\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Internet&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":470,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/13\/technorati_beta\/","url_meta":{"origin":379,"position":1},"title":"Technorati Beta","date":"June 13, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Check out the revamped (and well designed) Technorati. Here's what's new in the beta release: We've improved the user experience, making Technorati accessible to more people and, specifically, people who are new to blogging. We've tried to make it very simple to understand what Technorati is all about, and make\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Blogging&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":273,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2004\/02\/04\/janet_makes_internet_searching_history\/","url_meta":{"origin":379,"position":2},"title":"Janet Makes Internet Searching History","date":"February 4, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"According to Lycos, Janet's Super Bowl incident is now the most searched thing in history. I'm not surprised given the flood of hits I've received from search engines. I knew I was gonna kill my bandwidth, but this is nuts. As an aside, who actually uses Lycos??? :-) Janet Makes\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Internet&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":443,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2005\/01\/19\/new_movable_type_plugin_for_fighting_comment_spam\/","url_meta":{"origin":379,"position":3},"title":"New Movable Type PlugIn for Fighting Comment Spam","date":"January 19, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"If you're using Movable Type be sure to install the new 'nofollow' plugin. It implements a new way of marking links in comments and trackbacks so that they will be ignored by search engines. Let's see what the spammers do now to try to get around this. (hat tip to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Blogging&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":96,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2003\/07\/21\/googles_advanced_news_search\/","url_meta":{"origin":379,"position":4},"title":"Google&#8217;s Advanced News Search","date":"July 21, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"The best site for news just got even better. Google News has just unveiled their advanced news search. Now you can search for content from a specific source (e.g. L.A. Times, CNN), location (country or a U.S. state), a date range, or you can specify where your search terms occur\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Internet&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":217,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2003\/10\/09\/add_feedster_search_to_mozilla_firebirds_search_box\/","url_meta":{"origin":379,"position":5},"title":"Add Feedster Search to Mozilla Firebird&#8217;s Search Box","date":"October 9, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Diego has written a plugin which adds Feedster to Mozilla Firebird's search box. Have at it.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Internet&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}