Much can be done to improve the quality of search results. No amount of tweaking of metadata or search configuration will, however, ensure that the most relevant results always appear at the beginning of the list.

This is where search engine ‘best bets’ come in. 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.

Presenting best bets

In the screenshot shown, the staff member has searched for ‘organisational structure’. The first section highlights the intranet page ‘CSIRO organisational structure’. Below that, the rest of the 4821 matching search results are presented, most of which just include the words ‘organisational structure’ somewhere in the page.

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