CIL 2012 Day 1 - Teaching the Machine : Using Search Log Data to Create a Smarter Search Tool

J Michael DeMars of California State University presented this talk on a project that the library there did to improve search results for users on its federated search interface, called Xerxes, an open source "library portal application."  This software will search a number of different products including Ebsco, Metalib and Worldcat.

The project that launched the improvements that the library made to its search was a survey asking students about how often they used this search interface and how happy they were with it.  The staff quickly determined that they had students who would click around the interface until they found something, "clickers", and people would would cut to the chase and just type whatever they wanted into the search box, called "searchers."  The focus of the survey was on the searchers.

The survey found that 81 percent of the students generally found what they were looking for.  This sounds pretty good, but Mr. DeMars was unhappy that 19 percent couldn't find what they were looking for.  He didn't have any further information from the survey that would indicate where the problems were, so they started looking through search logs for problems, as this was the only place they could look.

From this research they found that although librarians tend to carefully craft searches, the student users tend to ask complete questions, use abbreviations, type a database name (sometimes misspelled), search for a URL, or even search for a complet citation copied from the bibliography of an item.

The users have learned to throw bad searches at Google and get good results, so they try and perform the same searches at the University.  Unfortunately, the University's search engine wasn't being clever enough to provide any useful feedback from these searches.

They decided to try and fix broken searches. All searches go through a script that analyzes the search looking for common problems and redirects appropriately.

This seems like a good approach to the problem and is almost certainly something that can be used to improve our little search box.  I look forward to coming back and seeing if I can implement some of the kinds of things they did.

Originally there was supposed to be a second talk alongside Mr. Demars, but the second speaker was unable to make it.  The track's host, Diane Fichter of the University of Saskatchewan, extemporaneously discussed issues in usability with the University of Saskatchewan website until it was time for lunch.