As an intranet becomes more popular and contributions to the site increase, the number of pages, documents and articles and, subsequently, the number of results on search queries, grows exponentially. Sifting and sorting through this ever-growing information becomes more and more difficult. In this article we'll look at three intranets from ...
Articles tagged: search
Targeting enterprise search to key tasks
Enterprise search is often deployed as 'the answer' for the difficulties of finding information across an entire organisation. The basic concept is that the enterprise search indexes 'everything', and findability problems are solved. In practice, teams given the task of designing and deploying enterprise search find these projects much more complex. ...
The scent of search
Tyler Tate and H. Stefan Olafsson discuss information scent and search. To quote: 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 ...
Do intranets only need search?
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 ...
Enterprise search versus federated search
Theresa Regli writes about the difference between enterprise search and federated search. To quote: 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 ...
“Best bets” functionality for search systems
Karen Loasby has written about search engine best bets, highlighting some of the debate that surrounds this functionality. To quote: 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 ...
5 tips to create a successful intranet, part two: search
Peter Richards has written a post on positioning intranet search, as part of his series of five tips. To quote: You should make your People Search & Information Search accessible ALL THE TIME. This means having the search fields visible on every page of your Intranet and preferably in the ...
Review: Successful Enterprise Search Management
Successful Enterprise Search ManagementStephen E. Arnold and Martin White 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. ...
Improving your first page of search results
Gerry McGovern has written about improving your first page of search results. To quote: "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 ...
Starting from zero: winning strategies for no search results pages
Greg Nudelman discusses designing search results pages when there are zero results. To quote: 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, ...
Who owns intranet search?
To make intranet search successful, the right technology must be put in place, and the necessary work undertaken to design and configure its operation. 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 ...
Enterprising times – a case for search best bets
Nic Price has written a post on search engine best bets, in an intranet context. To quote: 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” ...
Simplify the search user experience
Out of the box, most search engines are poorly designed for the needs of general intranet searchers. Cluttered with complex features, these search tools can easily be overwhelming for staff who simply want search to work ‘like Google’. The first step that the intranet team should take when installing a new ...
