#23259
Utilizing a User's Context to Improve Search Results 
This paper describes some design practices for providing a scoped search interface for an e-commerce site.
Gremett, Peter. Earthlink (2003). Design>Web Design>Search>E Commerce
#26167
Visibility in Italian Search Engines
Visibility in Italian search engines is a matter of content, design and organization just as it is in the English-language engines. As Jill often points out to us, the better your content is, the more targeted traffic your Web site will generate.
WTB Language Group (2005). Articles>Web Design>Localization>Search
#25229
Web Site Copy is about More Than Keywords
For writers who focus too intently on keywords and phrases, there is a danger. A danger in optimizing your pages for good keywords? Yes, I think so.
Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Search
#26717
Web Site Design Mistakes--Database Parameters In URLs
Creating a web site takes thought, planning and execution. Unfortunately, many designs are dead in the water before they are even published as far as search engine optimization is concerned. Whatever you do, avoid these critical mistakes.
Pires, Halstatt. Ezine Articles (2005). Design>Web Design>Search
#31801
Website Content: Getting It Right for Search Engines
The content on your website is key for your search engine ranking - find out why this is.
James, Nick. Webcredible (2008). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#25955
What Search Engines Need to See to Rank Your Site Well (Part 1)
A substantial number of people use search engines to find goods and services that interest them. Incredibly, though, many web designers don't pay much attention to designing sites to rank well in searches. This means that in order to protect your investment in your website, you need to know what has to be done to get good rankings, and how to make sure that your designer has done it.
Bennaco (2004). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#25954
What Search Engines Need to See to Rank Your Site Well (Part 2)
A substantial number of people use search engines to find goods and services that interest them. This second half of a two-part article explains how to make sure that your web designer has set up your site so search engines will like what they see and rank you high.
Bennaco (2004). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#24482
According to Forrester Research, almost 80% of all searches conducted online are done with search engines. Marketing your Web site through the various search engines is still considered to be the most effective way to drive traffic to your Web site. But how will potential visitors find you?
Berg, Debbie. WebDeb (2001). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#25851
What's the Buzz About? An Empirical Examination of Search on Yahoo! 
We present an analysis of the Yahoo Buzz Index over a period of 45 weeks. Our key findings are that: (1) It is most common for a search term to show up on the index for one week, followed by two weeks, three weeks, etc. Only two terms persist for all 45 weeks studied — Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez. Search term longevity follows a power–law distribution or a winner–take–all structure; (2) Most search terms focus on entertainment. Search terms related to serious topics are found less often. The Buzz Index does not necessarily follow the "news cycle"; and, (3) We provide two ways to determine "star power" of various search terms — one that emphasizes staying power on the Index and another that emphasizes rank. In general, the methods lead to dramatically different results. Britney Spears performs well in both methods. We conclude that the data available on the Index is symptomatic of a celebrity–crazed, entertainment–centered culture.
Bladow, Nicole, Cari Dorey, Liz Frederickson, Pavla Grover, Yvette Knudtson, Sandeep Krishnamurthy and Voula Lazarou. First Monday (2005). Articles>Web Design>Search>Assessment
#26484
If you’ve been working with keyword optimization for a while, you know there are times when some great keywords drive tons of traffic to your site, but the resulting conversion rate is terrible.
Usborne, Nick. nickusborne.com (2004). Design>Web Design>Metadata>Search
#27534
Where's the Search? Re-examining User Expectations of Web Objects
In 2001, Bernard determined that users were able to form a schema for the location of web objects on informational websites. The current study investigates whether users' expectations have changed since the 2001 study. Changes were found in the expected location of the site search engine, internal links, and advertisements.
Shaikh, A. Dawn and Kelsi Lenz. Usability News (2006). Design>Web Design>Search>Usability
#24147
Which Keywords Should You Optimize Your Site For?
In this article, we focus on the correct way of finding out the keywords for which you should optimize your site for the search engines. This article will give you the formula for the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) - a mathematical formula which I have developed to help you determine which keywords you should be optimizing your site for.
Roy, Sumantra. 1stSearchRanking (2002). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#14198
Why Amazon Succeeds -- And Why It Won't Help You
Amazon is one of the best on-site search capabilities we've ever seen. But surprisingly, the reason why it works so well is likely to be the same reason why Search won't work well on your site.
User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Search
#21998
Why Search Engine Traffic Should be Your Top Priority
Why would anyone bother risking money on marketing strategies that probably will not increase traffic to your website? Why not concentrate on what does work? - The search engines.
Zwicky, Richard. Metamend (2004). Design>Web Design>Search
#25340
A developer friend of mine, before he knew I worked for an SEO firm, told me he thought of SEO as 'snake oil,' not an uncommon view among many Web professionals.
Wilkie, David. Search-This (2004). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#26714
Why Your Web Designer Should Know About Web Marketing
Many excellent web designers know next to nothing of web marketing, and this can be a big problem. Marketing a site in search engines requires that the site be designed in a search engine compatible format. Many beautiful sites do not fare well in search engines at all simply because of the way they have been designed. Here are some things web designers should know about web marketing.
Pires, Halstatt. Ezine Articles (2005). Design>Web Design>Search
#26493
One of the most fundamental steps when optimizing a website is writing a robots.txt file. It helps tell spiders what is useful and public for sharing in the search engine indexes and what is not. It should also be noted that not all search spiders will follow your instructions left in the robots.txt file. In addition, a poorly done robots.txt file can stop the search spiders from crawling and indexing your website properly. In this article I will show you how to be sure everything will work correctly.
Dixon, Clint. SEOchat (2005). Articles>Web Design>Search
#25133
Writing articles is one of the best way to improve the link popularity of your website - find out why.
Dixon, Nicholas. Webcredible (2005). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#26721
There is a raging debate over the relative importance of on-page search engine optimization and off-page optimization. This case study that offers presents some intriguing findings.
Leonhardt, David. Klariti (2005). Articles>Web Design>Search
#26904
Google 的真实情况是怎样的呢？回答是：它并不简洁。 瞧，我喜欢 Google。它是个很棒的搜索引擎，但是我比较反感听到有人表扬它的外观优雅而简洁。见鬼，所有的搜索引擎都有一部分是优雅而又简洁的：在输入框中输入要查询的词语，然后按“回车”键。 “不”，有人会马上反对说：“Google的搜索页面是那样的简洁、优雅，没有和其它的功能挤在一起”。
Norman, Donald A. uiGarden (2006). (Chinese) Articles>Web Design>Usability>Search
#32139
Applying Turing's Ideas to Search
Users hold search to a human standard of understanding that computers cannot as yet achieve. This is more than just a curiosity: The Turing test has something to tell us about how we can better design our website search interfaces today.
Ferrara, John. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search
#32273
Web Retrieval Systems and the Greek Language: Do They Have an Understanding? 
Searching the web is a common activity of web users. English and non-English speakers utilize international or local search engines so as to satisfy their information needs. Most of the attempts at evaluation of search engines focus on English queries and on English document collections. In this paper an evaluation methodology is presented and the capabilities of international and local web retrieval systems using Greek queries are evaluated based on this method. We aim at identifying difficulties and knowledge requirements when using a Greek supporting search engine. The importance of interface localization and the effects of standard information retrieval techniques such as case insensitivity, stopword removal and simple stemming are studied in international and local search engines. The evaluation methodology is applicable to other non-English natural languages as well.
Lazarinis, Fotis. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Language
#32275
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 understanding of the user needs and intentions than analyzing the distribution of the visited pages only. We are not aware of any previous study that analyzed the relation between the query submitted to the search engine and the webpage the user clicked on the search results page. Since search engines provide snippets, when the user clicks on a specific page he already has some information on what is to be found on the page and the user makes a conscious decision to click on the specific result. Thus, this type of analysis provides additional information about the users' actual information needs.
Ravid, Gilad, Judit Bar-Ilan, Shifra Baruchson-Arbib and Sheizaf Rafaeli. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Language
#32327
Use of Collaborative Recommendations for Web Search: An Exploratory User Study
This study investigated use of collaborative recommendations in web searching. An experimental system was designed. In the experimental system, recommendations were generated in a group report format, including items judged relevant by previous users, search queries and the URLs of documents. The study explored how users used these items, the effects of their use, and what factors contributed to this use. The results demonstrate that users preferred using queries and document sources (URLs), rather than relevance judgment (document ratings). The findings also show that using recommended items had a significant effect on the number of documents viewed, but not on precision or number of queries. Task difficulty and search skills had significant impact on the use. Possible reasons for the results are analyzed. Implications and future directions are discussed.
Zhang, Xiangmin and Yuelin Li. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search>Metadata
#32332
An Analysis of Failed Queries for Web Image Retrieval
This paper examines a large number of failed queries submitted to a web image search engine, including real users' search terms and written requests. The results show that failed image queries have a much higher specificity than successful queries because users often employ various refined types to specify their queries. The study explores the refined types further, and finds that failed queries consist of far more conceptual than perceptual refined types. The widely used content-based image retrieval technique, CBIR, can only deal with a small proportion of failed queries; hence, appropriate integration of concept-based techniques is desirable. Based on using the concepts of uniqueness and refinement for categorization, the study also provides a useful discussion on the gaps between image queries and retrieval techniques. The initial results enhance the understanding of failed queries and suggest possible ways to improve image retrieval systems.
Pu, Hsiao-Tieh. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Visual Rhetoric>Search
