Читать книгу Search Analytics for Your Site - Louis Rosenfeld - Страница 18
ОглавлениеChapter 1. How Site Search Analytics Can Save Your Butt
I could jump right into telling you all about site search analytics—after all, that’s the goal of the book. But a story might be a bit more instructive and interesting way to introduce the topic. So let’s start with a true story of how one large organization faced a grave problem with its search system—and how site search analytics saved the day, as well as some jobs.
The Brake Gets Pulled
John Ferrara should have been satisfied.
After all, his employer, financial services giant The Vanguard Group, had just purchased a powerful new search engine to make its intranet’s content searchable. Given its long history of investing in user experience, the company had asked John, an information architect on the staff, to help select the new engine and ensure that it served the end users. And, unlike many organizations, The Vanguard Group actually listened to its information architect’s advice. The installation was going swimmingly, and the technology seemed to be working. The search engine was running on a development server, the launch was scheduled, and it wouldn’t be long before Vanguard’s 12,000 employees were enjoying a far better search experience.
And yet, something didn’t seem quite right.
The project manager wanted to ensure the quality of the search results and asked John to do a review of the build on the development server. So he poked around and kicked the new engine’s tires, trying out a few common search queries to see what happened.
What happened wasn’t pretty. The search engine seemed to be retrieving results that made no sense; the results were far worse, in fact, than those of its predecessor. How on earth could all that time, money, and effort lead to an even worse search experience?
The launch deadline loomed just a few weeks out.
