A few facts about OpenLearn search

Jenny Gray, Lead Technical Developer, OpenLearn

OpenLearn site structure

Explore

LearningSpace LabSpace

Arts & Humanities Business & Management … etc OER ProjectSpace SectorSpace

Arts & Humanities Business & Management …etc

Arts & Humanities Business & Management … etc

Green & Purple = traditional OpenLearn

Green = what most think is OpenLearn

Blue = old Open2.net, new layer of OER

How do people find LearningSpace

Search engines

45%

Referring sites37%

Direct traffic18%

Other0%

Referrers

open.ac.uk 30.50%

education-portal.com 11.03%

google.com 4.61%

oedb.org 2.58%

bbc.co.uk 2.57%

ocwconsortium.org 2.09%

diplomaguide.com 2.09%

en.wikipedia.org 2.04%

guardian.co.uk 1.47%

facebook.com 1.06%

What I take from this is that most

are not recognised

Open Ed sites

OU links

Other bits of OpenLearn

47.56%

Main OU website

27.26%

Maths Help 10.06%

OU Search 3.17%

LearningSpace 3.15%

Maths Choices 2.47%

Student VLE 2.36%

Google dominates search

Google 91.66%

Search 3.93%

Yahoo 1.90%

Bing 1.37%

Search.com appears to be part of CBS

What search terms do they usetop 25 terms all have openlearn on page 1 results (or pay per click). Is SEO more important than metadata??

Top 10 keyword search terms

Open University 4.33%

Open learn 3.85%

openlearn 3.47%

Open learning 1.37%

Interpersonal skills 0.8%

Open university free courses .61%

Operations management .6%

Openlearn.open.ac.uk .57%

The open university .38%

Open university uk .35%

For a top term, that’s not a big %

is it

Top 50 keywords by type

Free OU learning 12.03%

OU in general 6.04%

Content specific 5.18%

Free learning .47%So people aren’t

looking for a subject often in

Google

Pay per Click works!

• Total traffic from non-paid Google 31%

• Total traffic from paid Google 11%

Metadata is pointless

• 87th search term used by <0.1% of site visits = first use of our keywords

• 93rd search term used by <0.1% of site visits = first use of a course code– Suggests our choice of metadata (source

course, source faculty etc) rubbish!– BUT: unit titles are really important, and

keywords pretty good too…

Or is it??Term Title Summary Keywords Content

what is europe X X X

the enlightenment X X X

differential equations X X

english grammar X X

systems thinking X X

teamwork X X

eutrophication X X

french revolution X X

network security X X

computer systems X X

what is poetry X

giving presentations X

database development life cycle X

marketing communication X

Sunset song X

Interpersonal skills X

Operations managements X

Ict systems X

Recruitment and selection X

Ratio proportions and percents X

What is crime X

joss, s (1995), “evaluating consensus conference: necessity or luxury? X

Top landing pages

Topic listings 70.77%

LearningSpace home 10.82%

Topic forums 5.17%

My LearningSpace 1.17%

Why register? 0.57%

Individual units 0.52%

How people find content on the site

1. Browsing category list 12%

2. Search 3.4%

3. Full unit list 0.5%

% are totals of all site traffic which visit these pages, so once on the site, search is not a top used page!

OpenLearn search options

• Unit search– Search box on all pages– Searches metadata

• Title• Summary• Tags

• Advanced search– Link on all pages– Full text index

Advanced10%

Unit90%

Advanced search keywords

Advanced search keywords

Electrical engineering 10.22%

Course materials 8.29%

Top searches 6.54%

Pre-university academic level 3.52%

Recent searches 2.5%

Gibbs reflective cycle 1.59%

Child support agency rich picture 1.26%

Unit search keywords

Unit search keywords

Academic subject area 23.55%

OU Course code 2.35%

Academic sub-area 2.01%

Almost always one-word searches. Top 100 don’t reference academic level, author, format or any other obvious metadata field.

e.g philosophy, music, history, english

Most of these are our keywords or in title/summarye.g latin, creative writing,

project management