Executive Summary - White Paper: Search Behavior - Search Trends
According to IDC analyst Susan Feldman, the time spent looking for and not finding information costs an organization up to $6 million a year. This number doesn't include lost opportunity costs, calculated to $15 million, or the costs of reworking information that exists but can't be located, calculated to a further $12 million a year. Although these numbers address the consequences of poor search within an organization, the problems with search are universal. Users and visitors experience the same type of problems when searching an e-commerce site, a corporate web site, a portal or an intranet. Only the reasons for why to bother from a site administration as well as business perspective differ. Within an organization, search is typically a matter of maximizing efficiency and reducing costs. For public-facing web sites, increased sales, increased customer satisfaction and reduced costs in connection to self-service are typically the measurements at stake. Whether search is used to present the most relevant product to a prospect or to deliver the best pieces of information for an employee, the underlying challenges as well as methods to overcome them, are the same.
A high repetition of the top 100 search terms indicates a targeted site, or at least that users have a uniform understanding of what the site offers. | |
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