ISYS:web 7 Follows the Trends

One of the new built-in features of ISYS:web 7 is SearchTrends. Search Trends enables you to analyze, in depth, what users are searching for on your Web installation and whether they are finding exactly what they need.

To use SearchTrends, you will first need either SQL Server or, on smaller installations, the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000), which is available on the ISYS:web 7 CD for install. Alternatively, you can download it from : http://www.microsoft.com/

You must first point ISYS:web 7 to the correct location of your SQL database. Do this in ISYS SearchTrends administration under Web 7 http://localhost:8700/WebServerMaintTrends.ihtml. Specify the correct location for your SQL database with the correct login. More details on this can be found in the inline help within Web Administration.

Now that ISYS knows where to store the data, all queries and document views made to any of the websites setup within ISYS:web 7 will be recorded into your specified SQL database. This data can then be analyzed by pointing to the ISYS SearchTrends we site on your server: http://localhost:8701/. Let’s have a look at some of the typical data you might see.

First off is a screen shot of the SearchTrends homepage:

You can see on the left hand side of the screen the different websites that are setup on your installation. By expanding the tree structure of each of the sites, you are given further options (e.g., Top Searches, Searches With No Results). By clicking on these options, you can drill down into the available reports for each site. We’ll take a look at the Top Searches for the Default website:

From this screen we can see that the top searches so far are "*" (wildcard search for all documents in an index) and "RECREATION". You can define how you want this report to display by adjusting "Items to Show" (default of 10) and the "Time Span" (set to 30 days in the picture) and clicking Update Report. Let’s click on RECREATION:

So looking at the data we can see that RECREATION has been searched for two times, averaging 17 documents found. We can also see the ISYS session data from each of those keyword searches, with the date and time and also IP address associated with these queries. We’ll click on the first session and see if we can get more data about that user’s particular activity during that session:

Looking now at the user’s session, we can see a lot more data. We can check the User Name they logged in with, the browser or agent they were using, their login time, other searches they made along with the documents found, and also how many documents they viewed from that list of documents.

This user obviously found more interesting information when they searched for "BUSINESS", so let’s click on that now to see which four documents they opened:

Now we can see more information about those four documents viewed. This, tied in with the other options, could be extremely useful for pinpointing whether your users are getting the information they need.

It would also be useful to know which sites within your ISYS:web 7 installation are putting the most load on your server. Clicking on the available Server Reports will give us this information:

Here we see clearly that the Default website is taking up 84 percent of the server load. You could easily see from this screen which sites within ISYS were most popular on your installation over a given time. It could also be useful to see what days during this period received the most search traffic. We can check this by going to Site Activity:

We can see that on January 20th, the Default website had its most usage.

In summary, SearchTrends is a valuable new feature of ISYS:web 7 designed to help improve an organization's ability to closely analyze their users’ search behaviors and trends. Everyone from webmasters and content managers to marketing professionals and executives can derive significant insight from these reports, while also getting quantifiable metrics that support various decisions related to improvement of the user's interaction with your websites and intranets.

Don’t forget, if you have any questions regarding Tech Tips you can email:
support@isys-search.com.