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Search keyword referrer personalisation

Logged Friday, 11th October 2002 - anthonyjhicks.com - Perma-Link - Comments (5)

I made a post back in April that a couple of people commented on as being an interesting idea. I was trying to think of ways of leveraging the search keywords used by visitors referrerd to my site from Google. Well I finally procrastinated my way into writing a prototype that works. Its running on my pictures, media and weblog sections, the page detects if the visitor is coming from Google, extracts the keywords they entered into Google, and then performs a query across all the content records in my site, returning up to 30 relevance ranked related pages on my site.

See some examples here (select my site in the results):

picture of the olympic flame
buy my junk
space rocket pictures
lounge room picture
checker shadow illusion
lego dope

Of course if you're not referred by Google, the site will still attempt to suggest related links based on the page you're viewing. Its especially good for people surfing in from other blogs on permalinks.

Aussie Blogs internet.au writeup
Ericsson Chatboard
Bluetooth figures

Lots of tweaking required as it returns pretty bizzare results sometimes, but it's a start.

Why am I doing this? - When a visitor comes from Google, for example looking for "b52 videos", I want to be able to suggest ALL the pages that they may be related on my site, not just the page that Google ranks highest. Increasing their chances of finding good results for their original query, and better exposing my site content to their needs.