In this article we’ll look at three intranets from the Intranet Innovation Awards that use metadata and taxonomies to provide classification systems and filtering options to help users drill down effectively and find what they’re looking for. This concept is far from new, and can be found on many public-facing websites and systems. Yet for intranets it’s become something of a lost art. Perhaps because of the complexity of designing such databases, or the general lack of sophistication of intranets themselves, relatively few sites offer such functionality.

Classifying search at AMP

AMP is a well-known Australian financial services firm with a reputation for technical innovation. AMP’s intranet, the Hub, was recently redesigned and won both a 2010 Intranet Innovation Award and a 2011 ‘Best intranet’ accolade from the Nielsen group. In redesigning the Hub, the AMP team embarked on a full user-centred design process and amped up the capabilities of the search tool, while ensuring a consistent user experience that in many ways mirrors the typical web experience. Classification schemes include the following:

• Location: In the same way that you can filter by country using Google or Bing on the web, this search experience allows users to filter results by Australia and New Zealand, where the vast majority of AMP’s staff are physically located.
• Time/Date: Also instantly recognisable from web search is the timeline filtering, seen on the news archive page. Users are able to filter results based on the day, week, month or year.

Beyond time and location, filtering options become more complex:

• Teams and format: Users can sort by business units and teams, and easily find any results by type, for example web pages, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDFs, audio and video.
• Colours: Complementing the main search results are colour-coded labels that, where appropriate, match the well-known colour scheme of Microsoft’s Office suite. So, blue is for document, green is for spreadsheet and so on.

[February article by Alex Manchester, read the full article]

In practice, teams given the task of designing and deploying enterprise search find these projects much more complex. Many questions need to be answered:

• Which information sources should be indexed?
• How should the results be presented?
• What functionality should be provided for staff?

To answer these questions, teams need a clear vision of the desired end state, including an understand of staff needs and tasks.

With power comes complexity

The problem with enterprise search tools is that they are too good. Most modern search tools can index an incredible range of information sources, including but not limited to:

• intranet(s)
• public website(s)
• document and records management system
• staff directory
• collaboration spaces
• business systems
• fileshares
• emails
• third-party information sources

[November article, read the full article]

Facets are categories that describe the properties of an object or collection of objects. Facet categories then have values. In faceted navigation schemes, the values are the things you click on to navigate to a set of items or to filter a list. The type of structure that those values have, however, can vary depending on the type of facet you are dealing with.

While the principles for amplifying information scent in search-based interfaces are complimentary to those of browse-based models, they are yet distinct from them. Understanding how information scent applies to search first requires an understanding of human search behavior and the factors that affect it.

A client recently asked me: “Navigation, isn’t that a bit old hat? I mean, this is the time of Google. Doesn’t everybody just search?” No, they don’t. Good navigation and good links are vital for the success of a website. A search feature is an added bonus, sure. But if you have one, it has to be as good as Google or even better.

Also called guided navigation and faceted search, the faceted navigation model leverages metadata fields and values to provide users with visible options for clarifying and refining queries. Faceted navigation is arguably the most significant search innovation of the past decade.[2] It features an integrated, incremental search and browse experience that lets users begin with a classic keyword search and then scan a list of results. It also serves up a custom map (usually to the left of results) that provides insights into the content and its organization and offers a variety of useful next steps.

Every once in a while, intranet teams have to justify the amount of time they spend structuring their sites and improving navigation.

Stakeholders, often very senior ones, ask: ‘Why don’t we just provide search, like Google’. This would save the time spent developing a user-centred site structure, and after all, ‘it works for Google, and it’s the most popular site on the web’.

It’s an interesting idea, and on the surface, an attractive one. Search is something that can be bought as a product, and deployed. It’s even possible to get a Google-branded product for enterprise deployment.

Coming up with a good information architecture (IA) for intranets is hard. With a huge volume of content, and widely varying staff needs, intranet teams can sometimes despair of ever producing a site structure that keeps everyone happy.

How easy it would be to abandon all this work, and to deploy a great search engine instead. Problem solved. Or is it?

[CM Briefing 2010-06, read the full article]

A question often asked by people learning about search technology is, “what’s the difference between enterprise and federated search?” It is not the simplest question to answer, and in my travels I have found that the many various definitions of these terms typically don’t help in explaining the difference. And that’s because the difference is very subtle indeed.

Best Bets are essentially editorial picks that appear at the top of the search results. They are a manual intervention for use when the search engine isn’t developing the best results for the users. Some sites use them to fix just a couple of problematic queries but others have built up extensive databases of thousands of best bets.

Every survey has shown that search causes considerable frustration within organisations. As the volume of information grows exponentially, so does the difficulty of delivering an effective search, and user dissatisfaction is reaching record levels.

This book therefore comes just in time. It cuts through the vendor-driven hype around the latest features, and presents a measured approach to understanding and designing search. It is a must for all intranet, web, information management and IT teams who have been tasked with delivering search that works.

The book starts by exploring what is meant by “enterprise search”, and sensibly draws a broad boundary. An overview of the search marketplace also sheds light on the often confusing overlap of products and features.

A lot of meat is then provided on how search works, advanced functionality, and the complexities of security and multilingual support. These sections are worth the price of the book alone, as it is extremely difficult to uncover clear vendor-neutral information on these topics.

Not content to leave it there, the book then outlines a solid methodology for selecting and implementing a search engine, drawing upon the extensive professional experience of the authors. The book concludes with an exploration of search engine design, usability and management.

Both authors have been prolific writers on the topic of search, but this is their best work yet. Highly recommended.

Score: 9/10

Google posted an update about its eye tracking usability studies today. Most of the results are not exactly groundbreaking. It is, for example, no surprise that most users only scan the first couple of search results. Indeed, most Google users don’t seem to scan much further than the second result. There are, however, some interesting nuggets of information in this post about how Google uses this data to study every aspect of its search results page.

“Search is now normal behavior. What do we do about that?” is the to-the-point title of an excellent study of search behavior on the UK Open University website. Among the many practical recommendations it gives is to focus attention on the first page of search results for your customers’ most important search words most important search words.

The typical product team has no coherent strategy for cases when there are no search results. Most teams spend the bulk of their design phase working on the search results pages for a successful search. Then, at the last minute, the engineers hurriedly slap something together for the no search results page and launch. Such an approach is detrimental to the success of a search experience. Search, more than any other activity on your Web site, is a living, evolving process of discovery, a conversation between a customer and your system. Unfortunately, misunderstandings in this conversation are all too common, and the effectiveness of the page that appears when there are no search results is critical to keeping the customer engaged.

Once these practical steps have been completed, the next key issue is to resolve who ‘owns’ search on the intranet.

In other words, who has the responsibility for maintaining and improving search, and has the access to the search engine to make the required changes.

Owning search

In most cases, the ownership of search should not reside within IT. The search engine may have been originally installed by the IT department, with the necessary work done to integrate it with the intranet as a whole.

Beyond these initial activities, however, search should be owned by the intranet team, and maintained as part of their overall intranet activities. Only the intranet team is likely to have the right focus, skills and time to ensure that search is effective for staff throughout the organisation.

The intranet team should be given a high degree of access to the search engine itself, with the ability to change configuration files and other settings.

[CM Briefing 2008-21, read the full article]

The top 25 search terms accounted for half of all searches. The top 50 terms accounted for 75% of all searches made.

We tried searching for the top 10 terms, including “training”, “expenses”, “ariel” (the BBC in-house weekly newspaper) and “jobs”. The results were worrying to say the least. Few of them returned the result expected on the first page of search results.