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Table of contents

Introduction

  • The nature of the problem
  • Importance of effective search
  • Screenshots in this report

What is not in this report

  • No vendors or products
  • No implementation details
  • Intranets, not websites
  • Intranets, not enterprise search
  • Not search engine optimisation

Key recommendations

  • Making it happen

Principles of effective search

  • Search should work like magic
  • Ensure relevance
  • Provide strong ‘information scent’
  • Build trust and confidence
  • Understand search needs and behaviour
  • Do work on behalf of users
  • It’s not a training problem

Selecting a new search tool

  • Evaluating the current search engine
  • Selecting a new search engine
  • Useful resources

Nine steps to improved intranet search

  • Summary of steps

Step 1: Search engine familiarisation

  • Reviewing product manuals
  • Limits of self-taught knowledge

Step 2: Understanding staff needs

  • Staff interviews
  • Workplace observation
  • Usability testing
  • Surveys
  • Usage statistics
  • Planning the research

Search personas

  • Creating personas
  • Two personas
  • Patrick Hunt (general search user)
  • Lisa Turnbull (specialist search user)

Step 3: Refining the search interface

  • Search for general users
  • Search for specialist users
  • ‘Advanced’ search
  • Search interface options

Step 4: Refining the search results

  • General principles
  • Search results for general users
  • Search results for specialist users
  • Dividing the search results page
  • Options for the search results page
  • Options for each search hit
  • Improving search aesthetics

Step 5: Search engine tuning

  • Search engine weightings
  • Ensuring all pages are indexed
  • Searching documents
  • Default to ‘and’
  • Spell checking
  • ‘Sounds like’ and fuzzy matching
  • Stemming
  • Metadata

Step 6: Search engine usage reports

  • Value of search engine reports
  • Most popular searches report
  • Failed searches report
  • Further reports
  • Implementing the reports
  • Making use of the reports

Step 7: Key search enhancements

  • Search engine synonyms
  • ‘Best bets’
  • Other enhancements

Step 8: Usability testing

  • About usability testing
  • What to test
  • Sample tasks
  • When to test
  • Who to test
  • Using the results

Step 9: Allocating ongoing resources

  • Ownership of search
  • Ongoing activities

Advanced search approaches

  • Enterprise search
  • Federated search
  • Faceted search
  • Taxonomies and search
  • Search as browse
  • Multilingual search
  • Search as knowledge management

Other Step Two Designs products

  • Intranet Roadmap
  • Content Management Requirements Toolkit
  • Staff Directories report
  • Intranet Review Toolkit