Interesting search statistics for the Wrensoft.com web site

[David]

We log the searches that people do on our web site in order to ensure we return the a optimal set of results.

From 03/Mar/2004 to 11/Sep/2006 a total of 80,962 searches were performed on our web site. The average number per month was 2517.

The top twenty search words were,

test 3448
zoom 2049
search 1467
php 809
pdf 635
software 539
help 470
download 468
free 381
asp 379
web 358
sex 354
dreamweaver 313
google 287
search engine 271
cgi 250
hello 248
engine 243
price 221
wrensoft 213

Why people would be searching for sex on our web site is something we don't understand. It is interesting to see that overall 90% of searches were for a single word. Roughly 10% were for a multiple words and less than 1% were for an exact phrase or wild card. Searches using negative search terms were extremely rare.

[gfineman]

Roughly 10% were for a multiple words and less than 1% were for an exact phrase or wild card. Searches using negative search terms were extremely rare.

Perhaps one reason for the low numbers is that there is no way to tell that exact phrase or wildcard or negative searches are possible. That is, there are no hints or help available from the tiny search box nor from the advanced search screen. Is it even reasonable to assume that Zoom is the search engine? Not when it says at the bottom of the page that it is powered by VBulletin and the search options are not Zoom type options (e.g. size of thread).

[David]

Not true. All of these searches were done before the vBulletin forum software was installed on our site.

Plus on our search page we have the text, "Note that you can use "*" and "?" as wildcards. Enclosing more than one word in double quotes ("search engine") will search for the exact phrase". I would be willing to concede that no one reads the instructions however.

But you also need to consider that the convention we use for exact phrase and negative terms is the same as Google and other major engines. This is not the case with wild cards as Googles doesn't support them. But I would have expected that a higher percentage of people had already been educated in basic search engine syntax. Seems not however.

Is it even reasonable to assume that Zoom is the search engine?

Not sure what you mean by this. These stats were from our web site (wrensoft.com), from the Zoom log file as created by Zoom.