May 2003 Archives
May 27, 2003
Popular Links in print
I was delighted today when it was pointed out to me that the 'Popular Links' feature on the BBCi homepage that I helped develop had made it into print - even if it was only Matthew Norman's diary column in The Guardian - A reader who logged on to the BBC website last week was intrigued to note that the most popular searches currently include Princess Anne. "Having an inquisitive mind, I clicked on the link to find that...
May 20, 2003
The future is smaller, faster, better and much, much, much more virtual
I was at the BBC Research & Development department in Kingswood Warren today, for one of their open days. One of the bonuses of working for the New Media department of a big broadcast organisation is that occasionally you get to gate-crash the broadcast bit. Every two years R&D have a series of open days, and one of the days is reserved for BBC staff. Kingswood Warren is a fantastic building out in the greens of Surrey, that looks...
May 11, 2003
Daniel E Rose on search interfaces
Returning to the chi2003 papers, I was interested in the observations of Daniel E. Rose from Altavista in his paper "Reconciling Information-seeking Behavior with Search User Interfaces for the Web" [Microsoft Word doc - 226kb]. "Search interfaces reflect the attributes of the tools we use for searching, rather than what we know about how people look for information ... In fact, nearly every web search enigne offers users the identical search experience, regardless of the task they are trying...
May 6, 2003
How search can help you understand your audience - part 4
This is part 4 of a 4 part article: 1 2 3 4 Download a print version of this article Using search to understand the diversity of the audience When I do presentations I often bring along printed materials. For everyone in the audience I print an A4 sheet of paper with between 15 and 20 search terms. Every search term on every sheet is unique. The impact depends on the size and specialism of the audience, but I...
How search can help you understand your audience - part 3
This is part 3 of a 4 part article: 1 2 3 4 Download a print version of this article Using search to spot gaps in content One area where analysis of search logs can be invaluable is in spotting gaps in content. If a steady stream of visitors come to a site looking for something that is not currently being provided, it makes sense to provide it, or at least provide directions to where the user may be...
How search can help you understand your audience - part 2
This is part 2 of a 4 part article: 1 2 3 4 Download a print version of this article Using search to spot flaws in navigation Search logs also provide a wealth of information on what users are trying to find, and are failing to find. A prominent example of this on the BBCi site has been searches for "eastenders". The previous iteration of the BBCi homepage [Nov 2001 - Nov 2002] included a drop-down menu of popular...
How search can help you understand your audience - part 1
This is part 1 of a 4 part article: 1 2 3 4 Download a print version of this article How search can help you understand your audience In my article "A Day In The Life Of BBCi Search" I studied the behaviour of users of search on the BBC's website. Subsequently I have been giving a series of presentations on how we can use this information within the BBC to feed into our design processes, our content creation,...
How search can help you understand your audience
I have written up my recent presentations into How search can help you understand your audience. It is available as an online article here, and as a PDF version that can be downloaded....
May 5, 2003
Bizarre search terms on MSN - and BBCi
MSN have issued a report on bizarre search terms that are only used once or twice, according to this BBC News story. The MSN hotlist rates their most popular searches - I note that they add the caveat "excludes prurient content" to their top 20 list, which implies that there would be some in the top 20 if they didn't exclude it. No surprise there. However none of them top the search on BBCi which grabbed my attention in...