Lou Rosenfeld, one of the coauthors of the seminal “Polar Bear” book from O’Reilly, launched a press last year dedicated to developing and producing books on user experience strategy and design by means of user-centered design principles. One of the books coming out from Rosenfeld Media, Search Analytics for Your Site is coauthored by Rosenfeld himself (with Richard Wiggins).
The book’s description makes the case for analysing search logs when trying to improve a website:
Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.
For more insight into this book-in-progress, read a sample chapter for a preview, check out the delicious-driven bibliography to keep up with the research, or take a survey to contribute to the book’s development.