1. Information Architecture
Home Page
Week 9 Winter quarter
03/04/02 SOS
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2. Objectives Overview of issues dealing with search
Case study of PhotoDisc’s search engine
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3. Search What is our objective as site designers?
Should we create a search experience such that users use natural language and find what they are looking for with one attempt?
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4. Commercial Search Engines
Use of Meta tags for crawlers and robots
which keywords - include competitors keywords to come up on more searches
registering and submitting url’s to commercial engines
marketing function
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5. Adding search to your site
Why add to your site?
Users are goal focused; 50% start with search
At what level of content requires a site level search engine
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6. Type of content Documents and databases
html, PDF’s, word, excel spreadsheets, messages,
images, audio, video
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7. What is a search engine A way to find information
keywords versus databases
natural language
visual
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8. Common Problems No Search results Too many search results
Too many irrelevant search results
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9. How do users search
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10. Common errors that users make
Spelling errors
Difficulties in query formation – mistake AND with OR.
Error in search strategy - not a clear understanding of what they are looking for
Search terms ambiguous or non-specific
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11. Common errors Hyphenated words such as on line on-line online
e-commerce, ecommerce
Synonyms doctor versus physician; attorney versus lawyer
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12. Approaches to help overcome
Spell checking
Stems – check for checking, checker, checked,
Wild cards *
Synonym expansion
Stop words
Query by example
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13. Clustering
What is the chunk returned – a page, a database record, an thread
What if many hits returned all relate to a common section of a site
Collapse or eliminate duplicate listings of the same page
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14. Relevance How many times is the keyword in the document?
How early in the document does the word appear?
Is the keyword in the title or summary or abstract?
How close are two keywords to each other?
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15. Search interface Basic search Scoped search Advanced Search
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16. Search Results How many matches Show url Files size
Type of content – pdf, word, html, jpeg,
Date last updated
Title
Abstract or summary
First 150 characters
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17. Search Results Number of returns to provide per page
Navigating through the results
Creating user preferences to determine
number of results
type of info displayed
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18. Usability Provide the text box instead of the link
Make the text wide enough for a typical query
provide on every page - hard to predict where a user will get confused
saving previous searches
no need to provide option to search entire web
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19. Build or Buy Use a service Install build from scratch
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20. Conclusions Need to determine requirements
Iterative approach - both for designers and users of site
Use query logs for tuning
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21. Conclusions
Will better structured sites make it easier for users to find what they want?
Will natural language improve results?
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