Popularity and findability through log analysis of search terms and queries

SHIL on the Web is the Website of the Israeli Citizens’ Advice Bureau. It provides information about rights, social benefits, government and public services and civil obligations. Activity on the site approaches 10,000 pages visited per day. It has interfaces in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. Logfile analysis of the SHIL Website revealed to our surprise that about 60.7% of the requests reaching SHIL from external sites (excluding requests from robots) are from general search engines (e.g. Google and MSN), and users reach a specific page on the site linked from the search results page. This finding seems to indicate that the site is not known well enough to the public. On the other hand the site is very active, thus it seems to serve Israeli citizens well, even without being a well known brand. In this paper we analyzed the external requests coming from search engines. The analysis is based on the 266,295 queries from search engines that reached SHIL during March-October 2005. Studying queries submitted to search engines is a novel technique for analyzing the access patterns to the site and provides a better Accepted for Publication By the Journal of Information Science: http://jis.sagepub.co.uk