Lurch engine
I've been spending a lot of time the last few months observing your habits. No--that wasn't me following you home in the beige Corolla--but observing your habits as a web visitor to NCPR, as tweaked out by the subtle algorithms of stats analysis. One number that jumped out at me was that 30+% of you come to our pages via an outside search engine. That tells me a couple of things-first, that many people come to NCPR from all over the world, looking for one thing that matched their interest, not to visit a local public radio website per se. This is a good thing; part of our work is to provide a window into the North Country for the world. But it also tells me that large numbers of our local audience are resorting to Google because they can't locate what they are looking for either through our site navigation, or through the poor literal-minded, three-legged site search tool that is built into ncpr.org. And that is, how you say, suboptimal.
After years of looking for a better internal search feature--something cheap, feature-rich and open-source, by preference--after trying to write search tips that are rarely read and only occasionally helpful, after trying to add extra search tools that give the visitor different options, we have decided to break free from our instinctive public radio penny-pinching and solve the problem the old-fashioned way--throw some money at it. In these days, a search engine that doesn't function in the same way that Google or Yahoo or any other big player does is not a search engine, it's a hide engine. So on our immediate shopping list is the Google Mini Search Appliance, one more heat-producing device to compete with the air-conditioner in the web office, but one that will allow visitors to search (and to actually find) whatever they are looking for at NCPR. Also in the works is a retooled site design that will navigate in a more logical and consistent way from page to page. If you have any horror stories about getting lost at NCPR, and any suggestions on smoothing the way, please drop me a line at radio@ncpr.org.
Labels: pubforge, search optimization, usability, web design
posted by Dale Hobson @ 1:02 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Dale, Didn't you suggest using the Google co-op search? We've implemented this for KBAQ (KJZZ still uses the old Google University search). Wouldn't this be a good stop-gap measure as you gather up the funds for the google search appliance? But then, this goes against the whole point of your post... it's okay to break out of our mindset and throw some money at the problem.
In defense of your search, one thing I would like to say is your use of keywords in your RSS feeds was an inspiration to me. You can see this here:
http://kjzz.org/search/rss?keyword=immigration
and here:
http://kjzz.org/map?keyword=immigration
And in what I attempted to communicate in my writing here:
http://johntynan.com/archives/29
Should we be thinking about a common API for station web sites? What is the best, most uniform way of constructing a url to return an RSS feed for a particular keyword? Perhaps this is something to think about in your upcoming work?
Just wanted to say that, even though you're looking to change what you're doing at NCPR, that there's a lot that you're doing well. Change is good. Self-evaluation is good. I hope the redesign goes well!
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