It has been mentioned in the past that search has a long tail, that is, a large proportion of the queries are unique or don’t get searched for very often. This is useful for search marketers to know about. e.g. the term digital cameras gets searched for often and many people trying are optimizing pages and buying keyword based advertising. However the term “7 megapixel canon camera with 2 day delivery” hardly gets search for at all, but would convert to a sale better, be easier to optimize for and cheaper to buy.

I wanted to see if site search has the same sort of tail as web search and explore what the implications are for site owners. First I reviewed the data from one of our web search customers and plotted the popularity of the top 1000 search terms - shown as a percentage of the overall traffic. The most popular search term (”google”) accounted for only 0.0044% of all the traffic. The 1000 most popular search terms only accounted for 0.3% of the overall traffic. This definitely looks like a tail.

We then selected four of our site search customers and plotted the popularity of each of their 1000 most popular terms. As you can see from the chart below - although each site has completely different content and visitors - the tails are all the same shapes. The main difference is in the size of the tail. Not surprisingly the more traffic a site has, the longer the tail.

We then looked at what portion of the search traffic was covered by the top 1000 search terms and plotted it against the total search traffic.

So what implications does this have for site search owners - knowing that they own a long tail? One of the main implications is how site search owners go about searchandizing. For those unfamiliar with the term (I’m not sure who coined it) searchandizing is using site search for merchandising, for example promoting products within your own site search for certain terms. Most advanced site search solutions provide these facilities. If you have a highly trafficked site then promoting items for a small number of individual terms is not going to have a huge impact for the majority of your users - you need to merchandise the tail.

This entry was posted by Shaun Ryan on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 5:43 am PST and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.