Strategies for improving enterprise search
13 January 2008 at 18:19 Leave a comment
John Ferrara argues the importance of going beyond the out-of-box experience at Boxes and Arrows Sep 07.
I’d agree with his argument that quality results only come about through applied effort.
The conceptual task
- Search engine. The algorithmic gears that parse the query and assign pages relevance.
- Content. The documents searched.
- Index. A catalogue of the locations of every word in every document.
- User input. The keywords and other parameters the user submits.
- Results display. The way the data returned by the search engine is presented.
Strategies
- Make content machine readable.
- Structural markup – using semantic elements and class attributes.
- Use the keywords and descriptions tags and build a controlled vocabulary to populate. Well, I think there’s rooms for a and the tactical application of wild keywords.
- More metadata – audience, sector etc.
- Ontology – Get the search engine to exploit the relationships between concepts.
- Index All of the Right Data
- Ignore unnecessary content – navigation, footers, adverts etc.
- Get all resources – what about content in PDFs, Word documents etc?. I’d agree that search needs to be aware of them, but disagree about indexing them all. I often find a more usable experience is to index a web page that provides links to and a summary of such documents. The ranking of digital assets can be unpredictable and getting it right is, as Ferrara says, a big job
- Make the most of user input – it is important to make the best of the user’s intent on their first search attempt- after all the user has probably a complex intent behind those few keywords and users are much less likely to make a second. (People Search Once, Maybe Twice – Jared Spool 2001).
- Query expansion – stemming, thesaurus.
- Syntax conventions – get the parser to understand common human syntax – and use AND as the default operator – not sure about that; it can be too restrictive.
- Assisting query formulation – Did you mean?, others searched for…
- Build results around the user’s needs
- Demonstrate relevance
- Generate a snippet which contains the user’s terms. I disagree – in an enterprise solution, they often not very good and you have the opportunity to teach editors to write good, relevant descriptions which include the most important keywords.
- Bold the terms that match the user’s query terms.
- Best bets/ recommended links. I’m a huge fan of these as they can really help orientate users and push important content for the business.
- Conditional content. Take best bets further and display contextually appropriate content when a query indicates a user has a particular interest.
- Demonstrate relevance
Entry filed under: search, search interface.
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