Search Statistics from the GSA

The Google Search Appliance lets us create “collections” of portions of the site that can be searched. These collections are what you see in the drop-down field on http://search.middlebury.edu. The LIS collection is also the one being searched if you enter a query on the LIS or Library home pages on the CMS. This collection is searched much, much less frequently than the main search, however we may find the results interesting.

Here are the top 15 queries of the LIS search collection in the last year:

jstor 51
tigercat 15
eres 11
psychinfo 10
special collections 9
mla 8
citation 8
JSTOR 8
oxford english dictionary 8
lexis nexis 7
thesis 7
printing 7
library hours 7
music library 7
segue 6

And here is the same for the LIS Wiki collection:

novell 2
server 2
tigercat 2
computer upgrade schedule 1
inurl:pdf 1
proprietary name 1
freeze 1
video 1
antivirus software 1
Novell, Tigercat 1
How to use Novell and Tigercat 1
wordpress 1
blog 1
after graduating 1
Controller’s Office 1

For comparison, and so you can see how infrequently the LIS search collection is used, here are the top 15 LIS-related queries from the “All” collection, which as you might expect indexes all the other collections:

segue 1152
library 388
email 306
tigercat 246
webmail 214
bannerweb 163
library hours 129
INB 119
jstor 108
inb 103
eres 102
banner web 83
netstorage 77
banner 72
computers 71

(Note on this last one: midcat is the 16th term with 70 queries).

You can see the full reports for each, which include more information at these on-campus-only links:

Report for LIS Collection 07/24/2008-07/24/2009

Report for LIS Wiki Collection 07/24/2008-07/24/2009

Report for All Collection 07/24/2008-07/24/2009

I also sent an email to Chris Norris asking for assistance getting us some information from Google Analytics. He was out yesterday and today, but appears to be in his office next week, just booked straight through with meetings. I’ll keep you posted on this item. Here is the list of questions I sent him:

1. What are the top 5 search terms within the LIS? (I’ll get this from the GSA)

2. What are the top 5 pages on the LIS site?

3. What is the most common click path from /academics/lis to the LISt blog and the LIS Wiki?

4. What links on /academics/lis (the landing page) are clicked on the least?

5. Same as (4), but applied to /academics/lis/lib, /academics/lis/help, and /academics/lis/about.

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