Enterprise Search

It's a new year: Time for better metadata!

The new year is a time when most of us resolve to make changes in our personal lives: losing weight, exercising more, spending more time with a spouse and/or the kids. We start the year with great energy to meet our goals, but sadly many of us fall short through the year.

This often happens in the enterprise as well. Improving internal search is a common resolution at the time of the year. For eCommerce sites, January generally means fewer site visitors once the holiday rush is done; so making changes won’t have a great impact on sales. For corporations, it’s a time of new budgets and great expectations: and more than a few of the clients I’ve we’ve worked with over the years tell me how poorly their internal search performs compared to the public search sites like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Why do these search platforms work so well? And why can’t your site search match their success? It’s a numbers game. By definition, public search platforms index millions of sites; and many of these contain similar if not identical content. This makes is easy to find what you’re looking for because thousands of sites have relevant results for just about any query you may try.

Intranet sites are different, Usually, there is only one page with the information you are looking for. But often, content authors, who have read about how to promote consent on Google, will add keywords using Microsoft Word’s “Properties” field in an effort to promote their documents. This attempt to ‘game’ the internal search platform generally interferes with the platform’s relevance functions and results in poor result relevance. Even the Document Properties the Microsoft Word provides can interfere with search effectiveness.

Years ago, we were working with a client who was interested in knowing which employees were contributing to the intranet content. When the data was processed, it turned out that an Administrative Assistant in Marketing had authored more documents than anyone else in the corporation. After a quick review, we discovered why this one person was apparently more prolific than any other employee. That person had created all of the template forms used throughout the company, so the Word Document Properties listed that employee’s name as the author of virtually every standard template throughout the company.

So in the spirit of the new year, I’d suggest that you spend a day or two performing a data audit to discover where your content – or lack thereof – is negatively impacting your enterprise search results. And if you find any doozies – I’d love to hear about it!

 

 

A Working Vacation

The month of January is associated with the Roman god Janus who, with two heads, could look forward and back. That said, I find December a quiet time that provides the opportunity to review the current year and to plan the coming new year. As I tweeted yesterday at @miles_kehoe, this is the most stressful time of the year for most sites focused on eCommerce. Changes are generally 'off-limits' - even an hour offline can put a dent in sales.

But for those responsible for corporate internal and public-facing sites, this is the time to review content, identify potential changes, and even new content. And if planned well, the holidays are often a great time to update intranet sites: from late November through the new year, activity tends to slow for more corporate sites. Both IT and content staff should be using this quiet time to make changes, from updates to current content - the new vacation schedule is just one the comes to mind - to minor restructuring. (Note: while the holidays are a great time to roll out major changes, these should have been in planning months ago: it's a holiday, not a sabbatical!)

For the search team, this is time to review search activity: top queries, zero hits, misspellings, and synonyms come to mind as a minimum effort. It's also a good time to identify popular content, as well as content that was either never part of any search result or was included in result lists but never viewed.

So - December is nearly half over: take advantage of what is normally a quiet time for intranets and make that site better!

Happy Holidays!

 

Poor Data Quality gives Enterprise Search a Bad Rap

If you’re involved in managing the enterprise search instance at your company, there’s a good chance that you’ve experienced at least some users complaining about the poor results they see. A common lament search teams hear is “Why didn’t we use Google?” Even more telling is that many organizations that used the Google Search Appliance on their sites heard the same lament.

We're often asked to help a client improve results on an internal search platform; and sometimes, the problem is the platform. Not every platform handles every use case equally, and sometimes that shows up. Occasionally, the problem is a poor or misconfigured search, or simply an instance that hasn’t been managed properly. The renowned Google public search engine does well not because it is a great search platform. In fact, Google has become less of a search platform and more of a big data analytics engine.

Our business is helping clients select, implement, and manage Intranet search. Frequently, the problem is not the search platform. Rather, the culprit is poor data quality. 

Enterprise data isn’t created with search in mind. There is little incentive for authors to attach quality metadata in the properties fields Adobe PDF Maker, Microsoft Office, and other document publishing tools support. To make matters worse, there may be several versions of a given document as it goes through creation, editing, and updating; and often the early drafts, as well as the final version, are in the same directory or file share. Very rarely will a public facing website have such issues.

We have an updated two-part series on data quality and search, starting here. We hope you find it helpful; let us know if you have any questions!