1. Krum Haesli, ITC hasli@intracen.orghasli@intracen.org / krum@haesli.net / @haeslikrum@haesli.net

2. Search is often implemented as a ‘second thought’ within organizations. First the intranet or document management system is installed, and then search is added to help users ‘find stuff’ within the growing repository of information. In many cases, search is deployed out of the box, with little (or no) extra effort put into customizing or improving its effectiveness. Worse, no attention is given to the search on a month-by-month basis. This ‘mundane’ search provides only modest value to the organization. Worse, poor search can be a major cause of staff frustration. Search can provide much more. Instead of just serving as a simple mechanism for finding pages or documents, it can be a valuable tool to support knowledge management goals.

3. Easy to use. Assist users to find the correct information. Display results in a meaningful way. Help authors to improve the content.

5. promoted ranked

6. These are a hand-created list of key resources for common queries, and they can dramatically improve the search experience, particularly on information-rich sites such as intranets.

7. Faceted navigation is the process of browsing for content by filtering on refiners that are tied to category pages. Faceted navigation lets you specify different refiners for category pages, even when the underlying page displaying the categories is the same

10. Results are more useful when targeted to the user profile – department, location, level of education, technical knowledge.

11. “ ”

16. SharePoint 2013 Search Based Application Search Verticals for Albums, Videos, Images, Audio and Illustrations Custom Search Display templates to show relevant assets information Custom Search “Facets”/Filters to narrow down results SharePoint 2013 Assets Library to manage content Remote Blob Storage (RBS) to store large media content outside the database Comprehensive Assets classification taxonomy – more than 10’000 terms Bulk classification based on Assets Albums (Document Sets)

20. Effort should be spent ‘behind the scenes’ to improve the effectiveness of your search. Most search engines have capabilities that, when implemented correctly, will help users to find quickly the exact pages they are looking for. These “behind the scenes” features must operate transparently, so that the user is not even aware of their impact. They should simply find the search engine both easy to use and effective.

21. Fuzzy searching, or ‘sounds-like’ This is a search engine feature essentially designed to find terms which ‘sound like’ those entered by the user. That way, it becomes possible to handle spelling mistakes and other inconsistencies. However, In most cases it is not very useful for the user and it is best “turned off”. The simple reason is that the fuzzy matching is too ‘loose’ and matches too many other terms. This tends to produce an unmanageable large list of results. Instead, it is recommended to use a comprehensive synonyms list, which we will discuss later). Stemming This feature takes the terms entered by the user and tries other combinations of endings. For example, searching for ‘walks’ would also find ‘walk’, ‘walking’, ‘walked’. Actually this proves to be very effective as it eliminates differences in singular vs plural uses of terms in pages. fuzzy matching behavior: The search for "numan" suggests the result of "Belinda Newman".

22. The order in which results are displayed by a search engine is the product of a number of complex weighting and ranking factors behind the scenes. These vary from engine to engine, and are not well understood. They also have a big impact on how effective the search engine is. (After all, users expect the page they are looking for to be in the top ten, not hit number 198.) Content Contributers / users often have questions like: ‘why does this page appear as number 2, while this other page (which seems the same) is number 50?’. Documented how the search engine sets its weightings and rankings. This is not an easy document to write, as it must be comprehensive and simple enough to understand. Work with content authors to simplify the weightings: while the search engine incorporates ‘advanced’ weightings, the value of these are usually outstripped by the confusion they caused. The message here: understand how your search engine works, and configure it (if required) to meet your specific requirements. The key is to have the search engine work in a ‘transparent’ and understandable way. (After all, searching is not black magic.)

23. The Problem: Usage statistics show that ‘typos’ are a large source of search failures. For example, ‘quarterly’ is a often-used search term. Unfortunately, it is just as often entered as ‘quartly’, ‘quartely’, quaterly’ and ‘quately’. All of these spelling errors are turning up in the ‘failed searches’ report. Similar words are used interchangeably, both by the users and the content authors. The Solution – Author maintained Synonym List Develop a web-based interface that allows technical writers to enter lists of words that are equivalent. The system then automatically updates the configuration files behind the scenes to make this work. Develop an easy method to identify problem terms, and create new synonyms, so that the content authors can effectively manage the ongoing use of the search engine. In this way, the list of ‘failed searches’ is kept manageably small. Have the search engine run a spell-checker across the search terms.

24. acting Recognize a product, promote the Knowledge Center Recognize an image search, query for images of cameras Recognize a top Video search, show videos of the Surface understanding Learn more about our products Find pictures of our cameras What can the Surface do? communicating

25. Query Condition Action

27. These report are required for continuously fine tuning the search engine and making it more and more useful and efficient: Full search usage A raw list of every search term entered by the users, the time and date, and the number of matches returned. Start with this, as it is quick and easy, and allows the developers to check that the search engine is working correctly. Search usage summary The top 100 terms entered by the users in each month, with the number of hits for each. This provides invaluable information on what the users are interested in, and highlight key areas where the documentation is missing and/or is inadequate. It also highlights sections which are heavily used, and therefore are worth spending some extra time refining. Failed searches A list of all the searches that returned zero hits. These resulted either from user errors (such as spelling mistakes), or because there is simply nothing on the site about those topics. This is obviously a ‘hit list’ of areas for the technical writers to create some new material. It also highlightsthe need for an enhanced synonym list.

28. These obviously reflect the information that is of greatest value to staff, and the relevant sections of the intranet should be further developed and enhanced. This also gives a good indication of what items should be listed on the home page of the intranet.

29. Failed searches (those that returned zero hits) can be caused by a number of reasons: No information is available: the intranet doesn’t currently provide any content on the topic that is being searched for. These items then form the basis of a “hit list” of information that should be gathered together and published. Different terminology: in many large organisations a range of terminology is used, which can make it difficult to find information. This is useful information in itself (it will assist in the development of effective navigation and labels), and the problem can be resolved by implementing search engine synonyms (lists of equivalent terms). Technical problems: even though information does exist, it is not being returned by the search engine (metadata issues are a common cause). Find, and correct the problems. Users can’t spell: typos and spelling mistakes are a common cause of search failure. Since it isn’t possible train staff to spell any better, this can be more effectively resolved by either search synonyms (see above), or with the spell-checking capability within the search engine itself.

40. Keep the interface simple. The search page should have a field to type in and a ‘search’ button. Complex interfaces and advanced searches will confuse users: by default, your search engine should simply do what the users expect. Take the time to configure the intelligence ‘under the hood’. The search engine should quietly assist the user to find the desired page (via synonyms, fuzzy searching, and so forth). Track the usage of your search engine, and use this to assess how well it is working. You should be gathering enough information to allow you to refine the engine’s configuration to better meet user needs The most valuable resource is user feedback which should be captured w/o interfering with user behavior.