Optimising Your Content for Findability

Kristian Norling, JBoye 2012, 6 November, Aarhus, Denmark

OPTIMISING YOUR CONTENT FOR FINDABILITY

#jboye12

@kristiannorling

@!ndwise

• Who is here?

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• 3 hours

• One 20 minute break ≈ 10.20

• Lifetime answer Guarantee on this class

Introduction

THE ENTERPRISE SEARCH AND FINDABILITY SURVEY/REPORTSIGN-UP & DOWNLOAD 2012 REPORT

As the amount of content continues to increase, new approaches are required to provide good user experiences. Findability has been introduced as a new term among content strategists and information architects and is most easily explained as :

“A state where all information is !ndable and an approach to reaching that state.”

Search technology is readily used to make information !ndable, but as many have realized technology alone is unfortunately not enough. To achieve !ndability additional activities across several important dimensions such as business, user, information and organisation are needed.

Description

Search engine optimisation is one aspect of !ndability and many of the principles from SEO works in a intranet or website search context.

Getting !ndability to work well for your website or intranet is a di#cult task, that needs continuous work.

In this tutorial you will take a deep dive into the many aspects of !ndability, with some good practices on how to improve !ndability.

Description

We will start some very brief theory and then use real examples and also talk about what organisations that are most satis!ed with their !ndability do.

Topics•Enterprise Search Engines vs Web Search

•Governance

•Organisation

•User involvement

•Optimise Content for !ndability

•Metadata

•Search Analytics

Brief Outline

IS IT EASY TO FIND THE RIGHT INFORMATION WITHIN YOUR

ORGANISATION TODAY?Source: The Enterprise Search and Findability Report 2012

EUROPE77%

MODERATELY/VERY HARD

WHAT ARE THE OBSTACLES TO FINDING THE RIGHT

INFORMATION?

EUROPE

64.2% POOR SEARCH FUNCTIONALITY

47.7% LACK OF ADEQUATE TAGS

48.6% INCONSISTENCY IN HOW WE TAG

CONTENT

47.7% DON'T KNOW WHERE TO LOOK

DATE -

THE SILVER BULLET OF ENTERPRISE SEARCHSource: IntranetFocus

ENTERPRISE SEARCH:

UN-COOL AND MISSION CRITICALSource: Julie Hunt

In Academia search is called Information Retrieval.

It is an old discipline, dating back thousands of years...

Basic concepts in Information Retrieval:

Recall and Precision, more later...

History of Search

“Enterprise search is the practice of making content from multiple enterprise-type sources, such as databases and intranets, searchable to a de"ned audience.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_search

Wikipedia De!nition

In the !eld of information retrieval, precision is the fraction of retrieved documents that are relevant to the search.

Precision takes all retrieved documents into account, but it can also be evaluated at a given cut-o" rank, considering only the topmost results returned by the system. This measure is called precision at n or P@n.

Source: Wikipedia

The Concept of Enterprise Search: Precision

Recall in information retrieval is the fraction of the documents that are relevant to the query that are successfully retrieved.

For example for text search on a set of documents recall is the number of correct results divided by the number of results that should have been returned.

Source: Wikipedia

The Concept of Enterprise Search: Recall

M number of relevant documents

N number of retrieved documents

R number of retrieved documentsthat are also relevant

Precision and Recall

Recall = R / M =

Number of retrieved documents that are also relevant / Total number of relevant documents.

Precision = R / N =

Number of retrieved documents that are also relevant / Total number of retrieved documents.

Precision and Recall

...enterprises typically have to use other query-independent factors, such as a document's recency or popularity, along with query-dependent factors traditionally associated with information retrieval algorithms. Also, the rich functionality of enterprise search UIs, such as clustering and faceting, diminish reliance on ranking as the means to direct the user's attention.

Relevance

Source: Wikipedia

PageRank

“Enterprise data simply isn’t like web or consumer data – it’s characterised by

rarity and unconnectedness rather than popularity and context.”

Charlie Hull, Flax Blog

Web/Consumer Data vs Enterprise Data

We do not have PageRank...

...but we have the bene"t of social!CMSWire: Social Reconnects Enterprise Search

Emails, People Catalogues, Connections, Tagging, Sharing etc.

Relevance

The Concept of Enterprise Search

• Resources! IntranetFocus: Enterprise Search Team Management

• Work with all Stakeholders = The whole organisation

•De!ne processes, roles and routines to govern the solution

• Help publishers get started by creating processes for better !ndability

• Create easy to use administration interfaces

Organisation

Amongst the organisations that are very satis!ed with their search, they have a (larger) budget, more resources and systematically work with analysing search.

As many as 45% of the respondents have no separate budget for search, but 20% have had a budget for 3 years or more. In the group with no budget 56% are very or mostly dissatis!ed with their current search. The dissatisfaction with search drops to 30% for those organisations with a dedicated budget for search. In the very satis!ed (67%) and mostly satis!ed (59%) groups a large majority has a budget. And 71% of the organisations without a strategy also have no budget.

Survey Results of Budget and Organisation

• In the Very Satis!ed (VS) with their current search group, the number of Full Time Equivalents (FTE) is 1-2 or more.

• 67% of VS and 71% of the mostly satis!ed groups do search analytics

• 50% do user testing regularly in the very satis!ed group

• 83% (VS) have a person or group that is responsible for analysing user behaviour and to make sure that search supports the business needs

• 84% have feedback functionality in the VS group

• 67% of VS have a taxonomy in place and 83% have a metadata standard.

What Does the Organisations Do That Leads

Findability?

• Search Manager

• Search Technology Manager

• Information Specialist

• Search Analytics Manager

• Search Support ManagerBy Martin White, IntranetFocus

Search Team

• Not a project!

• Time and Money important

• Measure, KPIs/Search AnalyticsCIO.com: How to Evaluate Enterprise Search

Findability Blog: Building a Business Case for Enterprise Search

Organisation

CONTENT STRATEGY@jcolman: How to Build SEO into Content Strategy

• Information Quality, with KPI

• Metadata Quality, with KPI

• Information Lifecycle Management

- Time to live for di$erent content types

- Archive, delete or keep?

• SimCorp example• Search Analytics on regular basis

Governance

• Get to know your users and their needs

• Make sure your solution is easy to use

• Perform continuous usability evaluations, like usage tests and expert evaluations

• Make sure users !nd what they are looking for

• Enable feedback loops for complaints, feedback and praise

• Examples: Nordea, VGR and many more

User Involvement

• Good Data/Information hygiene

• Crap in = Crap out

• Metadata is very important!Presentation: Taxonomy and Metadata demysti!ed

Video: TetraPak example

Video: VGR example

Information

• Clean up and archive or delete outdated/unrelevant information

• Ensure good quality of information by adding structured and suitable metadata

• Information Architecture and taxonomiesEarly & Associates: 10 Common Mistakes When Developing Taxonomies

• TaggingPresentation: Social Tagging, Folksonomies Controlled Vocabularies

Information

METADATA

•List

yeraze

svenwerk

DEWEY DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION

KristianNorling

Author: Douglas CouplandTitle: Generation APublisher: Windmill BooksYear: 2009Printed by: CPI Cox & WymanFirst published: 2004

Metadata

Semantic

• Metadata

• TitlesExample: Ernst & Young

Very Important

• Content Quality

• Information Life Cycle Management

ESEO: Actionable activities

• Manually - Editors

• Automatic - Software

• Semi-automatic - Software + Editors

• Tagging - Users (+Software)VGR Example: How to add metadata

Thomas Vander Wal:

Integrating Folksonomies With Traditional Metadata

Ways to add metadata

•Bene"t of Search Analytics

•What metrics are interesting?

•Actions to take based on search analytics

•Do’s and don’ts

Search Analytics

SEARCH ANALYTICS GIVES USER INTENT

Important, delivers actionable to-dos quickly

• 0-results

• Top Terms Searched for

Video: Search Analytics in Practice

Search Analytics

• Know what information is “most wanted” and work with that

• Promote information when it is in demand

• Are search queries seasonal?

• Find synonyms

Actions to take

...Fix 0-results

...Check common terms

...Cluster synonyms

...Use Key Matches / Best Bets /Sponsored Links

Do

A FEW HOURS EVERY MONTH,

CAN DELIVER GREAT RESULTS!

...Check user behaviour?

...Research in what context?

...Look at trending/temporal terms

Do - bonus

...Forget to work with your content

...Forget metadata

...Only use search analytics - combine with web analytics

Do not

SEARCH ANALYTICS FOR YOUR SITE

Conversations with Your Customers

by LOUIS ROSENFELD

@louisrosenfeld

Fantastic book

• Involve the users (and stakeholders!)

• Allow user input (forms)

• Training for editors and publishers

• Set up simple guidelines (E&Y)

• Lifecycle Manage Information

• Do Search Analytics

• Measure and follow-up

Summary

Create an information architecture or at least a content model, answering the questions; What goes were, what information are related and how should it be possibly to access the information?  Ensure that all information is mapped in this manner and if new types of information arise that doesn't !t the model, revise and restructure (not refactor). Make sure that information architecture is not optional but mandatory. 

Bonus (SharePoint) tip 1

The way forward in a more complex information landscape is metadata and search. Use the term store to create taxonomies and metadata structures, add as much needed information as possible and apply them to the information through the content types in SP, to all the information.

Applied term store information can be directly accessed via search as facets which is a very powerful tool to quickly navigate to the correct information. The term store also gives you other possibilities to create other ways to navigate that are not based on the classical usually more functionally or organisationally based navigation e.g. Via product, customer or projects. 

Bonus (SharePoint) tip 2

Socialise your content and make sure that user input counts towards search relevance and the overall information architecture. User input can be manifested as explicit or implicit. Explicit as likes or comment on the information, implicit via search logs. The explicit input is quite straight forward but might need a critical mass to become relevant e.g. More likes = higher relevance. Implicit via search logs needs more analysis but will give more leverage.

Bonus (SharePoint) tip 3

kristian.norling@!ndwise.com

@kristiannorling

@!ndwise

!ndwise.com

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