forward: understanding users’ searching habits to improve discovery

ForwardUW Madison catalog usage, tools, and plans.

How our catalog is used

Tools we use

Improvements

Catalog Usage

Pages 7%

Bots 69%

Assets 10%

Status 14%

Page Views

64% of traffic is from out of state

66% of the items are discovered

outside of the catalog

Finding an item locally

Anywhere

Advanced

Title

Author

Subject

For the remaining 34%

Anywhere SearchID

10%

Author 67%

Known Item 4%

Title 12%

Topic 8%

Advanced Search

• Most traffic is from “canned” searches

• The advanced form makes up only 0.6% of traffic

Subject Explore

• Clicked about 4% of the time

Subject Browse

• Topics and Places, about 3% of overall traffic

Author Browse

• 0.3% of traffic

Language Browse

• 0.3% of traffic

Spelling

• Used 15% of the time

• Yahoo @ $15 / month versus Bing @ $500 / month

Trends

• Increase in keyword anywhere searching

• Increase in outside traffic

• Increase in bot traffic

• Decrease in search referral traffic

Tools

Google Analytics

Inspectlet - heatmaps

Inspectlet - sessions

New Relic

New Relic

Collectd

Log parsing

Search Classification

Improvements

Improve Google Indexing

• Generate a sitemap to allow better indexing

• Utilize Google’s webmaster tools site

• Leverage microdata

Search detection

• Classification of BibID searches

• Classify known item searches

• Tailor responses based on search classification

Backend

• Page load and query times are seven times faster

• Further improve outlier performance

• Better metrics for external calls

Core Features

• Primo Central

• Alma

• Improved account management

• Provide API