Local search: Using site search in regional press websites - Part 2

Over recent months I've been writing a loose series of articles that focus on the website provision of the UK's leading regional newspapers. Yesterday I started a mini-series concentrating on the site search facilities offered by the 20 local newspapers with the biggest circulations, with a look at the Manchester Evening News, Glasgow Evening Times and some of the papers belonging to the icNetwork of online papers.

  This is...

Search on the 'This is...' network is accessed via a box on the right-hand side of the banner area. There are radio button options to search 'This is' or 'All sites'.

My personal opinion here is that this label is a little unclear. Without trying it, I couldn't with any conviction say what I expected to get if I selected 'All sites'. I guessed that I could be about to get search results from:

1. Jobsite, motors.co.uk and findaproperty.com, who all have logos directly next to the search box
2. The entire 'This is...' network of sites
3. All of the sites on the entire web

The results appear to be option two - stories from across the national network of sites.

Site search results offer refinement by facets. The options include place, date, keywords and people.

A "What's this?" link expands to show a very neatly designed piece of contextual help for using the feature.

There are ten results per page, and the search listings include a headline, a standfirst, and the date and time of web publication. Users are able to sort the results by 'Most recent', which is the default, and either 'Oldest' or 'Relevance'.

  Dundee Courier

Search on the Dundee Courier site is accessed from the left-hand navigation, underneath a list of latest news and sport headlines.

The site search is powered by Google, and is presented in the standard Google web search interface, with all the features that Google enables.

The usability of the site search, though, is compromised because individual stories on the Dundee Courier site do not have their headline quoted in the HTML <TITLE> tag. This is instead used for a promotional tag for the paper, and means that, at a glance, the search results all look the same.

  Aberdeen Press & Journal
  Aberdeen Evening Express

The Aberdeen Press & Journal and sister Aberdeen Evening Express search is placed in the very top right-hand side of the page, next to a banner advertising slot and above the main masthead area.

Search engine results are very sparse. Users are provided with a default of 20 results, which list just the headline and date of publication.

There are no refinement or advanced search options. Additionally, there is no count of the total number of results or pages returned - to get to page 2 after the initial display of 20 stories, users are urged to click a link labelled "Get More Results >>"

  West Midlands Express & Star
  Shropshire Star

On the West Midlands Express & Star and the Shropshire Star sites, search is also placed in the far top right-hand corner of the banner area.

Search engine results from the Star papers feature a headline, a stand-first and a date of publication. There is also a very prominent promo for the fact that search engine results for a specific keyword are available as an RSS feed. The Star papers were the only ones amongst the 20 I was looking at to offer this facility.

Next...

Tomorrow, in the third part of this look at regional newspaper search engines I'll be examining the Eastern Daily Press, Portsmouth News & Sports Mail, Yorkshire Evening Post and the Belfast Telegraph.