Search & Searchability

Presentation from David Hawking – CSIRO Ineffectual corporate search tools can be the biggest drag on employee productivity. Knowledge workers spend 15% to 30% of their time looking for info In short being able to search for information effectively is crucial

How search engines work David explained in detail how search engines work. Briefly the search engine crawls through linked pages from a start page. If the page isn’t linked it won’t be included. A catalogue is then created of all the crawled pages When you type in a search term then a query is run against the catalogue to return ‘hopefully’ relevant pages.

Metadata Useful for information not easily derived from the content Not usually done properly or consistently so becomes less useful

University target audiences 1.Potential students 2.Potential employees 3.Funding agencies & donors 4.General public & media 5.(current employees & students)

Google search Returns millions of results but ranks them well Guesses how many matches Uses link measures to rank Uses anchor text heavily ( can be fooled) External links may be out of date Has targeted ads

Importance of URLs The structure of your site is useful to humans and search engines is easy doesn’t work why? very hard to remember

Measuring your visibility in Web search engines David suggested counting our pages and comparing that to how many are indexed by Google. He showed us how to get Google to give a count of indexed pages. Listed some tests to try to check page ranks in Google i.e. search for University of South Australia and the homepage is topped ranked – good. Search for UniSA returns University of South Africa as top rank – bad!

Roles and Ethics of Search Engine Optimisers Must take account of the wishes of searchers

Once on your site… Browsing versus searching Some peoples’ first inclination is to search Staff want to search their own stuff (only) Potential gain in search quality -cut down on distraction

What can be done? Design information architecture to facilitate search Keep it simple Improve URLs of key pages Improve anchortext by Replacing “click here’” Making more links Get a better search engine

What works in Enterprise web Search? David presented a study which found – 1.anchor text is more useful then any other information 2.URL structure is also generally useful 3.Title, Metadata and URLs can be useful but some organisations do a much better job than others Results from David Hawking’s presentation showing the effectiveness of anchortext

The four web evils 1.Bad URLs 2.Lack of links 3.Lack of descriptive anchortext 4.Masses of near-duplicate content

Think before you publish 1.Publish useful/interesting/valuable stuff 1.In useful-sized chunks 2.With simple/meaningful URLs 3.And well-chosen titles 4.Without duplication (use links) 5.Using language which people are likely to use in queries 6.Accurate, appropriate internal metadata 7.Avoid unnecessary complexity 2.Link to it with good anchortext 3.Encourage others to do likewise (external) 4.Submit URLs of external site entry pages

David’s take-home Messages High quality search is critical to your business Few organisations have it. To achieve it you need BOTH: A high quality search engine, AND Searchable information resources To succeed you need to solve the three enterprise search problems: Getting visitor (customers) to your site Directing site visitors to what they’re looking for Ensuring that employees don’t waste time looking for resources they need to do their job.