The evolution of search analytics at Harvard Business School

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Analytics provides good fodder for your search engine.  Examining query and clickstream data and tuning your search engine accordingly can be a great method for improving the quality of search results.

In a session on the higher education conference track, Ravi Mynampaty from Harvard Business School (HBS) will outline how search analytics has evolved at the school using screenshots, demos and sharing the lessons learned. Ravi is heading up the findability program at HBS including the design and implementation of findability standards, search tools and search user interfaces. -A bunch of activities that has earned him the affectionate name “Search Guy” at the school.

The first two generations of search analytics at HBS were homegrown solutions – custom reports built off of raw search logs and a JavaScript page-tagging solution which supports audience-based views. The third and current generation is a hosted solution.

This session will cover where the out-of-the-box analytics of the search engine fell short necessitating the development of the above tools, and also the pros and cons of each analytics tool, which made the developmemt of the next version necessary.

While analytics for analytics’ sake can be a lot of fun(!) the ultimate goal is to provide better search results to the end-user. So this session will cover specific actions that were taken to tune search based on analytics data.

View this brief video for an introduction to the talk:

To learn more about search analytics, take a look at Lou Rosenfelds presentation on Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience from the recent SXSW conference. According to Ravi, “slides 47 – 55 are pure gold”.