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

[Eric Scheid]

On 20/3/06 8:26 PM, "Jonathan Baker-bates"
<Jonathan.Baker-bates at framfab.com> wrote:

> 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? 

No, I'm referring to the page previous to the referrer of the page where the
search occurred (penultimate = second to last in a series or sequence).

An example ... many search logs I've seen report the search terms submitted,
the number of results, and the referrer for the request (which is the page
where the search request was submitted). I'm suggesting tracking the page
*prior* to that referrer, ie. the referrer's 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?

The context is when examining search logs. We already know they warrant
special attention, I'm suggesting it might be interesting to discover the
context for the moment when the user turns to search .. which includes from
which previous page did they arrive at the page that prompted the search
action.

>> 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.

User intention? Hmmm ... maybe an example might help to explain what I'm
getting at (a little bit different from your example above): you see an
entry in the search log for "pears", and you see that the referrer for this
search request (where the search was submitted from) is the apples.html
page. What's the user's intention at this point? You can only guess.

What if you knew that they got to the apples.html page via a search for
"recipes apples pears"? The search doesn't have to be from google, it could
be from the internal search. From browsing the search log this example might
be obvious, but what if the preceding search wasn't "recipes apples pears"
but was instead "recipes pies"?

e.