Local search: Using site search in regional press websites - Part 4

Over the last 3 days I've been looking at the site search services provided across the 20 regional newspaper sites that I have been studying. The quality of the services varied widely, from a site like EDP24 basically begging the user to go off and try Google News instead, to the 'This is...' network of sites providing a sophisticated faceted filtering mechanism.

Today I wanted to publish a couple of table featuring a summary of some of my findings during this piece of research.

Search features

The first table looks at some of the features available from search. This includes the default number of results displayed, whether help is provided with misspellings, whether the user can subscribe to RSS feeds of results, and whether there are any options available to the user for sorting or re-ordering the results.

The features listed were observed during a research period between December 17th and January 5th 2009.

Search results format

The table below looks at which aspects of information are conveyed to users in the search results themselves. The features I looked for in particular were whether the results featured the story headline, an editorial standfirst or a contextually chosen snippet, the publication date, a URL, the site section or category where the story was published, an author byline and a relevancy score.

To clarify a couple of results in the table, I didn't see that any paper had specifically made the name of an article's author part of the returned search engine results. It might though sometimes appear in a 'contextual snippet' if the author's name was close to, or was the search terms used.

Additionally, the reason the Dundee Courier & Advertiser is the only paper listed as providing search results without a story headline is because they use a custom Google search. This indexes the HTML output of the paper, and story headlines are not included in the <TITLE> tag, meaning that Google cannot determine them for display.

Next...

Tomorrow, in the last part of this look at search across the UK's regional press, I'll be taking a slightly different approach. Instead of looking at search on the sites themselves, I'll be examining how they appear when you look for them in Google.