Lou Rosenfeld and Richard Wiggins are working on a book on search analytics. The first chapter of the book describes how they fell into search analytics and the Best Bets / search analytics paradigm. With Best Bets, if someone searches your home page for “library hours” or “special collections” or “newspaper database” or “JSTOR” you guarantee that the search gives “the” best hit at the top of the hit list, because you manually edited the entry into your database.
They’ve posted ac chaprter to ask if a free Best Bets tool would be of use to libraries in general, and research/university libraries in particular. There are lots of alternatives. Some libraries might make their catalog the default search, and insert the Best Bet URLs into the catalog. Others might use Google Appliance. or Ultraseek, or the new Yahoo / IBM Omnifind free search engine (up to 500,000 pages), all of which have Best Bets features. Others might use faceted or federated search tools they’ve implemented.
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