Zeitgeist Explained
zeit*geist | Pronunciation: ‘tsIt-“gIst, ‘zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.
Manifesto
In Web Services we tend to deal with with a lot of information; be it through the portal, email, or syndication. Lately, our job has been supporting the university in the management of creating and disseminating information. One way that we feel we can improve the communication process in the university is through data analysis. By looking for patterns and trends in information system usage, we can help better understand how the user is interacting with the information system. This, in turn, can help us make better decision as those information systems continue to evolve.
January 2006 Edition
Top 5 Search Queries
- Campus Map
- Academic Calendar
- Scholarships
- Textlink
- Transcripts
These queries came from the CSU, Chico Home Page. It comes as no surprise that in January those accessing the site would be looking for textlink to find out what books they needed for the spring semester. The really interesting query was campus map or map which appeared as the most queried term for the first couple of days of the semester; new students and/or students with classes in unfamiliar buildings explain the large number of map related queries.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Keith // Feb 28, 2006 at 10:24 pm
Can you produce a list limited to searches from on-campus (i.e. more likely to be faculty/staff)?
2 scott // Mar 1, 2006 at 12:15 am
Keith —
At this point, no. There’s an outside possibility, but I’ll have to look into it.
3 scott // Mar 1, 2006 at 10:30 am
Upon further investigation, it would be too difficult to filter faculty/staff queries. The best we could do would be queries from machines on campus.
4 pberry // Mar 1, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Another thing that we don’t have, that I feel would be nice, is from which page is the search coming from. Are people searching as soon as they hit the home page? Do they try and dig around themselves and then search? Obviously they are only searching from pages that actually have the search box, but still…
5 scott // Mar 1, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Agreed, however that data is not presently available. Keep checking for future editions of the Zeitgeist.