A client is starting to use CE's built in full text search tool on their web site, and I thought it would be a good time to highlight a great feature in CE that may not be widely known - the Search Request report.
The Search Request report is found in the Reports module in CE and shows what words and phrases users are searching for on your web site. This data is a great way to understand what your users are looking for and can allow a client to make adjustments so that sought after content is easier to find. Like most reports in CE, this report data can be exported to .csv / Excel files to be shared with others who may not log into the web site to review the data there.
This feature points to an important advantage CE has over comparable solutions, especially those where the web site, data management, and even search are separate products. With those kinds of solutions, you may have to find a 3rd party search tool to work with your website / content management system. Then, once you get those systems put together, the search may not easily be able to include password protected content in its search results. And then, if there is search reporting data available, it is usually in the search tool or the website management tool which is separate from your contact database. That means it won't be located with a lot of your other reporting by default. And then, of course, you will have to hire technical consultants to try and tie all these systems together, make sure that they don't break during upgrades, and so on. So, although some of these basic tools can be "free" (like with open source tools), putting them all together and maintaining them can be a real pain.
With CE, a great enterprise search tool is included out of the box, it can be dropped into your site with ease and styled with minimal effort, and the reporting is right there in the Reports module with all your other reports. And it just works.