The smartest thing I ever did with SL the first time around

Back when I was designing SportsLizard for the first time I was still in engineering school and I was overly obsessed with collecting and analyzing data (hence the industrial engineering major). Most of the quirky things I decided to track (like the intricate demographics of my users) were a waste of my time that should have been spent doing pretty much anything else.

But I did start tracking what people were searching for, and when I pulled the cobwebs off of my database the other day I was shocked to find over 24,000 searches. All of a sudden, I realized that I had an enormous sample of extremely valuable data - if I could see what my visitors have been searching for the past few years I could tailor the new site around it. Do people search for their favorite team? For their favorite collectible type (autographs, cards, etc)? Or for their favorite players? Or a specific collectible (1986 Michael Jordan Fleer)? Or all of the above?

Take a look at the top 20 (by % of searches):

reggie bush - 2.4%
vince young -2.32%
brady quinn - 1.82%
bo jackson - 1.58%
barry sanders - 1.46%
dan marino - 1.39%
pat tillman - 1.19%
san diego chargers - 1%
junior seau - 0.87%
tom brady - 0.84%
drew brees - 0.79%
lebron james - 0.77%
peyton manning - 0.77%
jerry rice - 0.76%
michael vick - 0.72%
mcfarlane - 0.71%
walter payton - 0.68%
derrick thomas - 0.66%
john elway - 0.66%
ladainian tomlinson - 0.66%

It doesn't take a statistician to figure out that the visitors to SportsLizard have been searching by player. Only two of the top 20 (San Diego Chargers and McFarlane) are not players. It's also obvious that there's a football bias, and a bias towards the players that are listed in the customs directory (which isn't a surprise because each player links to a search of their name).

Interesting huh? The new SL won't overemphasize teams and collectible type like most sites do, and will be sure to emphasize specific players like most sites don't. More cool data to come in my next post...