what are users searching for at my forum ?

[erich37]

how to see which terms users have entered and searched for on my forum ?

I do see my users (well, actually "guests") often using the "Search", but I do not know what they are searching for.....
would be great to have this available to easily see what "guests" to my page are searching for, so I would be able to better target my niche.

 

[Paul B]

Currently the only way to see that information is in the xf_search table.

 

[ragtek]

[ot]
This are only temponary values

The cleanup cronjob deletes all entries older then 1 day!
[/ot]

 

[Paul B]

True.

But if you check it daily you can see what is being searched for.

 

[Digital Doctor]

how to see which terms users have entered and searched for on my forum ?
would be great to have this available to easily see.

Excellent idea.
I would assume it would be easy to collect this information.
With the search term, would it be useful to know the member's name ?

 

[erich37]

an additional idea would be to show publicly what other users have searched for at my website, for example "searches from other users during the last 14 days at this website"

 

[Digital Doctor]

an additional idea would be to show publicly what other users have searched for at my website, for example "searches from other users during the last 14 days at this website"

..... I think that's kinda niche.
I'd be interested in what people search for here though.

But ... I think many people might want that information private ? at least in certain forums.

 

[Wildcat Media]

True.

But if you check it daily you can see what is being searched for.

Or use a cron job to dump it into another table, or out to a delimited text file. That would save most of the data for future analysis.

I wrote a search function for a client's product catalog, just so we could see what terms that shoppers were using to find products. It is also interesting because you can see how some incorrectly spell some of the terms, or observe if they are having any difficulties finding specific items. I currently use a stemmer in the search, which finds the root of each search word. I am also considering adding phonetic-based search results underneath the standard results using either soundex or metaphone, which might help shoppers if they can't spell some of the more complicated words correctly.

Come to think of it, I don't know if any current forum software uses either stemmers or phonetics in searches. Might be a first if XenForo were to adopt these somehow. I am not sure, but one or both may be available via Sphinx.

I guess it beats using pigeons.