8/14/2000

Recently, without fanfare, we made the SNET Internet web site searchable. Watching how this feature has been used has been a lesson in human nature since then, well worth sharing with our subscribers, who have been using the site search feature up to 3,000 times a day so far.

In order to better understand what our customers want from us and the site, we’ve routinely kept a log of what everyone is looking for when they search SNET.net. No, we don’t have any idea of what any individual is looking for – we don’t care about that, and it would be a phenomenal amount of work to set up a system that would do that. But we do have a long, long list of what subscribers have typed into our search box for the past few weeks. (For a list of the most common words typed into search engines, try www.searchterms.com.)

And we were a bit mystified at first. People were looking for things that no reasonable person would expect to find on the SNET Internet site. People were using our site search exactly as they would Snap, or Yahoo or any other of the major search engines on the World Wide Web.

We don’t have MP3 music files on SNET.net. We don’t have links to pornography. We don’t have computer gaming hints. We just don’t. We thought people would know that.

Then we figured it out. We had placed the SNET site search box on the search page (well, duh) along with our separate search box for the whole Internet. People were used to there only being one search box on that page. And, apparently, a lot of subscribers would follow this routine: They connect to the Internet. They go to the SNET Internet search page. And they type what they’re looking for in the search box.

And we’d changed things.

Suddenly, a lot of people weren’t getting the results they expected. Typing "sex" into the SNET.net search box gives you VERY different results from typing it in over at Excite or Hotbot. Not better, mind you. Just different.

Anyway, it all seems to be working out over time. Yesterday the SNET search box was only used about 1,500 times, mostly by people looking for things one might well expect to find on our site. "Configure email." "Weather." "Radio stations." THOSE, we can handle.

Presumably, people are adjusting – just as we are. We’ll continue to work on making things on the Internet easier to find from the SNET.net site and on improving and extending the searchability of the site itself. Thanks for helping us test things out. ;-)

Please send questions or comments to web.editor@snet.net.