Helping people find what they’re searching for
Looking through my access logs the other day I noticed something interesting. I’m getting some people visiting my site based on Google searches, maybe 10 hits a day. Usually Google points these people to http://www.fettig.net/ , the default (a.k.a "index") page of my site.
The problem is that I only keep the most recent 5 weblog entries on the front page, so a lot of the time the text Google was trying to direct them to isn’t there anymore. So to find what they were looking for they have to either:
- search through the archives manually
- go back to Google and pull the old version of my default page out of Google’s cache
Of course, I should have a search box on my site. That would give visitors a better way to find what they were looking for. But it doesn’t solve the core problem: People are coming to my site looking for something specific, and I’m giving them the same default page I give everyone else. The experience they have is similar to when you call tech support and, after explaining your problem, get tranferred to another representative, to whom you must explain your problem all over again:
Google: Hello, how may I help you?
User: I’d like to know about "python twisted asynchronous xml-rpc".
Google: I’d suggest you speak with Fettig.net.
User: OK. [clicks the link]
Fettig.net: Hi, welcome to fettig.net. Here are the latest 5 weblog posts.
User: [scans posts] Actually, I’m not interested in any of that. [begins looking for a way to search/browse the site]
That looks like bad customer service to me. But is there any alternative? Why, yes. How about checking to see where they came from before giving them the default page? If they’re coming from Google, and they searched for something specific, don’t give them the latest 5 weblog entries. Give them the 5 entries most related to what they searched for.
To do this myself, I need to have some way to search my site, and I’m working on that. But in the meantime I’ve added another feature that hopefully will make this site a little easier to use. If you come to this weblog from a Google search, all the words that were in your search will be highlighted in orange (for example, search google for "python twisted asynchronous xml-rpc", and click through to fettig.net). This works on archives as well as the default page, so it should be helpful even when Google directs a user to a specific page.
This works through a pyblosxom preformatter called "highlightsearches", which you can download here. Don’t use this preformatter if you’re using the preformatter-caching feature of pyblosxom — it needs to run for each page view, for obvious reasons.
