Students, new pilots, and CFIs seem to have an insatiable appetite for information, but finding information online can be frustrating, no doubt about it. It sometimes seems to me that this is the dark side of the bright promise of the "information revolution." What good is a Web site that has all the answers if no one can find anything? Life's too short. That's why I constantly challenge AOPA's information resources staff to develop better ways of sifting through the enormous volume of documents and databases on our Web site.
They've been busy this past year. By now you've no doubt noticed the new look and feel of AOPA Online. After working out the bugs of a new design featuring fly-out menus on the home page, we rolled out the changes to about 90 percent of the site, with the remainder to follow by the end of March. Another feature of the redesign was to add a search box to the upper left side of every page. The new search box and the fly-out menus can help you to find information faster and significantly reduce the number of mouse clicks in a typical online session.
Less visible but even more powerful are behind-the-scenes enhancements we've made to our search tools. Click on the "advanced search" link and you'll see that you can search the whole site, the public and members sections individually, or specific collections of information within those sections - AOPA Flight Training magazine articles or classified ad listings, for example. We'll add new collections as needed.
We're putting a lot of effort into improving the relevance of the results you receive when you perform a keyword search. Most search engines rank results according to the number of times the search term appears in the target documents. Sometimes this works well, sometimes not. We've improved the likelihood of success by weighting the results. For example, if the search term appears in the title of a document, that document is ranked higher in the results list.
We also filter your search query through a new electronic thesaurus. Therefore, a search such as "pilot license" will also return documents containing "airman certificate," just as a search for "GPS" will also return results for "global positioning system." The thesaurus is maintained by our Aviation Services specialists, who apply their knowledge as pilots and experience in answering members' questions on our toll-free Pilot Assistance Hotline (800/USA-AOPA) to improving the relevance of search results. I'd call that synergy if I hadn't made a New Year's resolution to never use that word.
Some search queries are so common that we can confidently recommend specific content on the Web site. "Learn to fly" is one such frequent query. To further improve relevance, the results of a search on this phrase contain not only a list of documents, but also a "webmaster suggests" box at the top of the page with links to specific items. Here again, the experience of the Aviation Services specialists in knowing which resources are most likely to be helpful allows us to actually add intelligence to the process of searching for information. While only a handful of queries have received the "webmaster suggests' enhancement so far, we'll be adding many new ones based on our review of user activity.
To that end, we're adding new tools to help us better understand and serve your needs. For instance, we're tracking the words and phrases used to search our site both with our internal search tool and through external sites such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo. This permits us to develop improved finding aids for the most popular topics (searches that return many results) and deepen our coverage of subjects for which few resources currently exist (searches that return just a small number of results).
Like all the improvements we've made since launching AOPA Online in 1995, these changes are evolutionary. Adding intelligence to our online applications is not a trivial task. It requires the application of experience, knowledge, technology, and not just a little mind-reading. But it's worth doing, and we look forward to your comments and suggestions about how we can continue to provide you with a world-class Web site that serves your needs effectively.
In the last three months of 2002, more than 250,000 searches of AOPA Online content using 20,000 unique search terms were performed from some 320 external sites. Another 125,000 searches using 6,000 terms were run on our own search engine. In each case, AOPA had resources to offer. Clearly, the hunger for timely, high-quality aviation information will not soon abate. It is our job to make sure that we have the information you need to make your flying safer, more affordable, and more fun. It's also our responsibility to make sure you can find it with a minimum of fuss - even if your goal is finding out how many of our documents contain the word Forrester.
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