Posted by Amazon on July 7, 2008 at 4:55pm
If you are interested in suggesting how to improve Drupal.org information architecture, look at the most popular searches to see what users are looking for.
This page now shows what authenticated users are searching for: http://drupal.org/authenticated-search-queries
Google Analytics is now sending a weekly report to the webmasters list of the most popular terms searched for using Google.
Comments
A quick scan of the list
A quick scan of the list shows the top spots are almost exclusively taken by modules.
And other than that,
And other than that, troubleshooting.
Of course this is authenticated users. Would be interesting to compare with anonymous users.
Bohjan has been talking to
Bohjan has been talking to people asking about what they knew about Drupal before they went to visit drupal.org. CCK and Views come out on top there too (presumably, that would have been searches done by anonymous users, first-time visitors).
Yup, it seems that most
Yup, it seems that most people hear of Drupal trough friends or websites that talk about different CMS's, the word views and cck is dropped a lot. I am unsure if people get the concept of these modules though, as people told me completely different interpretations of what they would be after looking at the descriptions.
Catch, I am worried if that behaviour is trigged by the lack of a good search engine and for specific searches annonymous and/or registerd users turn to google.
I have three ways of finding
I have three ways of finding modules - 1. type http://drupal.org/project/$module_name directly into firefox 2. type site:drupal.org $module_name into google 3. type $module_name into the drupal search box.
The first one takes a reasonable amount of familiarity with drupal.org and module names, the second and third I imagine most people will try. The only time I do 4. (go to http://drupal.org/project and browse) is when I absolutely can't remember the module name and have exhausted 1, 2, and 3.
It's likely that google does better than drupal.org search for finding modules, since they'll be ranked by incoming links much more. Would be fairly easy to do a spot check. One thing that might help with that would be adding a 'node type ranking' to search results (alongside recency, number of comments) - so that project pages rank higher than forums etc. in results.
Thinking about other searches I do, for issues, I use 'my issues' or the project advanced search form. For the handbook I sometimes search, sometimes browse - but much less frequently than looking for project pages or similar. So it makes sense to me that modules show up so highly in these results.
With module descriptions, the first time I saw the description for views (it's probably changed by now), I thought "I don't want this, I hate making lists"....