[Sigia-l] search logs - relevance of penultimate referrers?

[Jonathan Baker-bates]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org 
> [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf Of Eric Scheid
> Sent: 20 March 2006 02:46
> To: sigia l
> Subject: [Sigia-l] search logs - relevance of penultimate referrers?
> 
> I'm rolling out a search log tool and am wondering about 
> capturing and reporting referrers to searches, including 
> penultimate referrers.
> 
> A referrer to a search request would be the page the search 
> is done from.
> The penultimate referrer is of course the page previous to 
> the page the search is done from. Thus, for example, if a 
> search is done from a given product page, then would it be 
> interesting to know from whence they came to that page. For 
> example, the user arrived there from google, but then 
> immediately did a site search.
>

Forgive me if I've not understood you correctly, but aren't you just
talking about the difference between an internal and an external
referrer? In which case, just about all web analytics tools I've every
used can already give you that information. To this end, why is search
any more or less relevant here?
 
> How would you use this information? What conclusions might be 
> suggested from the evidence?

If lots of searches for "apples" led through to our "pears" page then
I'd be worried. But in general I'd give it all a low priority in making
any conclusions, since it's user intention I'm interested in, not just
statistics.

Jonathan