2 Highlighted Features
1. Common Search Metrics for the Digital Strategy
Do you ever feel like you're drowning in data? Do you feel like finding meaningful insights from the data is like searching for a needle in a haystack?
To standardize and streamline how agencies collect and report this data, the Digital Government Strategy requires federal executive branch agencies to implement common performance and customer satisfaction metrics. DigitalGov has published guidance on common metrics, including describing what you should measure, what to do with the data, and common tools to help you collect and analyze your metrics.
To support you in collecting and reporting your site search metrics for the Digital Government Strategy, we've added four new reports to the Admin Center.
Top "no results" queries. The most popular, valid searches that don't return any results on your site's search results page (e.g., because you don't have the content on your site, or the content isn't findable by the person's search term). Review your content to see if you need to add new content, or update existing content to include the words your readers search for.
Top searches with low click through rates. The most popular search terms that people generally don't act (click) on. Consider incorporating language from these popular search terms into page titles or descriptions, to encourage searchers to click on your relevant page.
Top changing search terms (movement up/down). Shows trending topics, what's hot or not. Use this report to investigate why people might be losing interest in once-popular content and consider archiving if it's no longer needed. For newly popular terms, create new content or update existing content to ensure it's current, accurate, and complete.
Top clicked URLs for specific queries. The most common results that searchers found most relevant or appealing, for specific search terms. Review these popular pages and other customer top tasks to make sure they are current, accurate, complete and compelling.
2. Recommended Pages in Type-ahead Suggestions
Searchers often know the exact page they're looking for. We've added a feature to help them find that page even more quickly.
As searchers type in their query, relevant text Best Bets are shown as Recommended Pages, as shown in the sample below for a search on fa… on DOL.gov.
Other Features
Searchers can narrow RSS news results by custom date ranges.
Searchers now see more images above the fold on image results pages.
Searchers see integrated image results across both the images on your website and in your Flickr photostream.
You can now add the Digtital Analytics Program's government-wide analytics tag to your search results pages. Email the Digital Analytics Program at DAP@gsa.gov for more information on setting up the government-wide analytics tag.
When you add your Twitter handle in the Admin Center, we now show the Twitter GovBox by default.
Chores
We upgraded the tweetstream (External link) and twitter (External link) gems.
We upgraded Jenkins (External link).
We upgraded to Cloudera 4.1 (External link) and installed Impala (External link).
Fixes
We fixed the URLs within your tweets so that searchers can now click on the links.
We fixed a bug so that infinite scroll now works on news and image results pages.
We now index your ISO-8859-1 encoded pages.
We now always show your no results section on the Query Logs page in the Admin Center.
We fixed some bugs with how the ends of the day and month were calculated so that the data displayed in our reports is consistent.
We fixed a bug so that the query timeline chart now displays in all browsers.
We synced the Query Logs and Click Stats reports so that you now see today's data for both.