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Purchase the archived recording: September - Search Analytics Case Studies
Cost: 50$
Description:
Presented by John Ferrara, Information Architect, Vanguard
This presentation will describe two methods developed at our organization for quantitatively measuring the quality of a website's search engine results using data readily available in search logs. The first is a quick and easy relevancy test that yields concise, bottom-line scores of how reliably the search engine returns the best matches first. The second is a more advanced and insightful evaluation of the results' precision -- the proportion of relevant and irrelevant matches clustered at the top of the results. The presentation will describe how to repeat the methods at any organization, and make available spreadsheets for automatically processing gathered data. It will also describe which solutions can rectify problems found in the evaluation.
This presentation will be of greatest interest to user experience professionals who want to improve the quality of a search engine's results and need a reliable and credible means of tracking its performance.
Presented by Miles Kehoe, President of New Idea Engineering, Inc.
Interpreting Your Search Activity Reports
Your search engine is the ultimate business intelligence tool. Click tracking tells you what your visitors looked at and what links they follow, but it doesn't tell you what they were looking for. You're stuck trying to infer intent from navigation. But when a visitor does a search, he is telling you what he is looking for. Are you listening? This talk takes a look at the reports you should be monitoring, and what each of them can tell you about your customer, your web site, and your company. Activity reports have a gold mine of information.
About your presenters:
John Ferrara, Vanguard
John has worked in information architecture for nine years, designing interfaces for websites, desktop applications, and web-based video games. He has been with Vanguard since 2006, leading the design of user interfaces for their search engine and the development of their corporate design pattern library. Before joining Vanguard he did significant work for Unisys and General Electric. For his design work on the UXnet website, he was honored with the first Instone Award for Volunteerism in 2006. John has been published in Boxes & Arrows and in ACM's Interactions magazine, presented at the IA Summit, and will be speaking at EuroIA in Amsterdam this September. Before entering the professional world, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in communications, paying for graduate school through an assistantship coaching intercollegiate speech & debate.
John's professional loves may include search engines and quantitative log file analysis, but his heart belongs to his wife Amanda. He lives with her in the Philadelphia suburbs and blogs at WorldWideIntertubes.com.
Miles Kehoe, New Idea Engineering
Mr. Kehoe is the founder and president of New Idea Engineering, Inc. He also founded Searchbutton, Inc., the leading ASP for site search and reporting solutions, and served as the Chairman of their Board of Directors. Prior to NIE and Searchbutton, Mr. Kehoe served as sales engineering and consulting manager for Verity, Inc., the world leader in search and retrieval technology. Mr. Kehoe has also held development and support positions with Fulcrum Technologies, Network Innovations, and Hewlett-Packard. Mr. Kehoe received his Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Tulane University and did graduate work in computer science at Purdue University.