Wednesday, March 11, 2009
See searching patterns on funda.nl live
I just finished a hobby project where I try to visualize the live searching patterns of users on our site (www.funda.nl, the premier Dutch real estate site). What I basically do is track the geographical region containing the current search results. I then plot these areas in a Google Map on iGoogle with some light animation. You can click the areas to see the actual URL used to find results in this area.
What I really like about this gadget is that it allows me to see how people search our site in a more understandable way (to me, that is) than the statistical facts of page views and click paths.
The data is near-live and is refreshed every 20 seconds. We display only a subset of the real searches, though; about 15%.
Click here to try this gadget on your iGoogle homepage.
