A Day In The Life
A Day In The Life Of BBCi Search: where we learn that:
- "an editorial and taxonomy team at the BBC constantly monitor the searches gaining high volume in order to match the correct content to them"
- "40% of the searches on the service were specifically and unequivocally looking for UK based information [...] 50% of searches were not geographically or culturally focussed on the UK at all. "
- "users were most likely to attempt to use advanced search between 6am and 9am in the morning, and between 3pm and 10pm in the evening, when around 5% of searches showed some attempt to use advanced search. Notably at the peak time for site usage, over the lunch period, users were only half as likely to use advanced techniques - around 2.5% of searches. [...] 1 in 5 attempts to use advanced search fail"
- "When a search is made on the BBCi site, effectively just two pieces of information are passed to the search technology - the search query itself, and the referring page. With these two pieces of information search is able to provide results that are contextualised in places where this is appropriate - for example, different top results for the search term 'china' depending on whether you are on the BBC News site, or on the Antiques site."
- "1 in 12 [search terms] feature incorrect spellings"
- "URLs made up around 3% of searches, and questions just over 0.5% of searches."
- "I found that 36% of searches consisted of just one word and 35% of searches used just two words. [...] 16% contained 3 words, 7% contained 4 words, 3% contained 5 words, and the remaining 3% consisted of six or more words."
- "Overall, this gives us a picture of where the focus of our users is at different times of the day. This is for 'educational' types of searches in the early afternoon. By 4pm the attention of BBCi users has switched to the areas of the site devoted to entertaining them. By the evening, the audience seems divided between two - between children looking for educational material, and adults looking for informative material."