Search Engine Performance

Although search engines provide a vital navigation tool for visitors and for many they are the primary tool for locating information, it is clear that they are not always being properly implemented.

SciVisum were approached by SOCITM to profile the quality of search engines being run across local government. Similar testing was performed by SciVisum in Socitm's 2004 Better Connected report.

Testing this time was conducted under the following headings:

• Availability of search engines
• Handling of two word searches
• Handling of common words
• Resilience to simple errors
• Delivery of fast results
• Results displayed per page

Just how important is a search engine?

Jakob Nielsen comments ...
Our usability studies show that more than half of all users are search-dominant, about a fifth of the users are link-dominant, and the rest exhibit mixed behaviour. The search-dominant users will usually go straight for the search button when they enter a website: they are not interested in looking around the site; they are task-focused and want to find specific information as fast as possible. In contrast, the link-dominant users prefer to follow the links around a site: even when they want to find specific information, they will initially try to get to it by following promising links from the home page.

Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, on www.useit.com

Improvements since 2004

Since 2004, the number of councils with no search has dropped to 6 from 64, and the number that were broken and so couldn't be tested at all during the project was down to 8 from 23 - overall the results from the detailed tests also show an improvement over the two years.

But there were some notable problems uncovered, for example some of the councils that display all search results on a single page (instead of listing 10 results per page a la Google), were pushing giant pages to the user, of up to 3Mbytes (a minute by broadband, and 10 minutes by modem).

Consistent with SciVisum testing of website functionality across the board, this test report shows that search engines are all too often being ‘hand crafted’ uniquely by organisations, and insufficient effort is being taken to ensure that functions are engineered properly for stability, consistency and ease of use.

The end result is search engines that provide neither a stable support to users, nor a stable and consistent load on the web server.

Information reproduced courtesy of SOCITM Better Connected Survey 2006