“Are my GSA search results good?”  Well, if you don’t know, then I don’t know.  This is obviously a subjective question, and you likely know your own content much better than I do.  While I may not be able to answer the question for you, I would like to offer some tips to help objectively measure the quality of your GSA search results.

Step 1: What are we measuring?

In order to make any conclusions about search result quality, we must first establish a set of queries to evaluate.  There are infinite possibilities, but we can use some smarts to pick a good list of queries to measure.  Here are a few suggestions:

• Most popular queries

• Worst-performing queries

  • Queries that returned no results

  • Queries where the user paginated very deep into the results

  • Queries where the user did not open any results

  • Queries where the user opened a bunch of different results in quick succession

• Trending queries

  • Queries with a significant increase over a short period of time

  • Seasonal or event-related queries