Search Behavior - Search Trends
Executive Summary
According to IDC analyst Susan Feldman, the time spent looking for and not finding information costs an organization up to $6 million a year. This number doesn't include lost opportunity costs, calculated to $15 million, or the costs of reworking information that exists but can't be located, calculated to a further $12 million a year.
Although these numbers address the consequences of poor search within an organization, the problems with search are universal. Users and visitors experience the same type of problems when searching an e-commerce site, a corporate web site, a portal or an intranet. Only the reasons for why to bother from a site administration as well as business perspective differ. Within an organization, search is typically a matter of maximizing efficiency and reducing costs. For public-facing web sites, increased sales, increased customer satisfaction and reduced costs in connection to self-service are typically the measurements at stake. Whether search is used to present the most relevant product to a prospect or to deliver the best pieces of information for an employee, the underlying challenges as well as methods to overcome them, are the same.
A high repetition of the top 100 search terms indicates a targeted site, or at least that users have a uniform understanding of what the site offers.
In Mondosoft’s efforts to fulfill the objective of making information retrieval a productive endeavor for our customers, instead of a source of frustration, we have analyzed a comprehensive set of search data. The initial objective of the analysis was to understand visitors’ behavior, in order to improve our customers’ usage of the Mondosoft solution. Our findings have certainly allowed us to define product improvements, but we have surpassed that objective to:
- Define a set of metrics for evaluating web site usability
- Establish benchmarks for determining the success of a web site in general and for local search in particular
See what IDC recommended based on this usability survey Download this White Paper now
Executive Summaries for other Mondosoft White Papers
Using Technology to Make Search Productive
Using Human Intervention to Make Search Productive