Category Archives: Conference

Tutorial: Optimising Your Content for Findability

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This tutorial was done on the 6th of November at J. Boye 2012 conference in Aarhus Denmark. Tutorial was done by Kristian Norling.

Findability and Your Content

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 findable and an approach to reaching that state.”

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

Search engine optimisation is one aspect of findability and many of the principles from SEO works in a intranet or website search context. This is sometimes called Enterprise Search Engine Optimisation (ESEO). Getting findability to work well for your website or intranet is a difficult task, that needs continuos work. It requires stamina, persistence, endurance, patience and of course time and money (resources).

Tutorial Topics

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

  • Enterprise Search Engines vs Web Search
  • Governance
  • Organisation
  • User involvement
  • Optimise content for findability
  • Metadata
  • Search Analytics

Brief Outline

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

Experience level

Participants should have some intranet/website experience. A basic understanding of HTML, with some previous work with content management will make your tutorial experience even better. A bonus if you have done some Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for public websites.

Enterprise Search and Findability discussions at World Cafe in Oslo

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Yesterday we (Kristian Hjelseth and Kristian Norling) participated in a great World Cafe event arranged by Steria in Norway. We did a Pecha Kucha inspired presentation (scroll down to the bottom of this blog post for the presentation) to introduce the subject of Enterprise Search and Findability and how to work more efficiently with the help of enterprise search. Afterwards there was a set of three round-table workshop with practitioners, where search related issues were discussed. We found the discussions very interesting, so we thought we should share some of the topics with a broader audience.

The attendees had answered a survey before coming to the World Cafe. In which 83,3% stated that finding the right information was critical for their business goals. But only 20,3% were satisfied with their current search solution, because 75% said it was hard or very hard to find the right information. More stats from a global survey on enterprise search that asked the same questions.

Unified Search

To have all the information that you would like to find in the same search was deemed very important for findability by the participants. The experience of search is that the users don’t know what to search for, but to make it even worse, they do not know where to look for the information! This is also confirmed by the Enterprise Search and Findability Survey that was done earlier this year. The report is available for download.

Trust

Google web search always comes up as an example of what “just works”. And it does work because they found a clever algorithm, PageRank, that basically measures the trustworthiness of information. Since PageRank is heavily dependent on inbound links this way of measuring trust is probably not going to work on an intranet where cross-referencing is not as common based on our experience. Most of the time it is not even possible to link stuff on the intranet, since the information is not accessible through http. Read more about it in this great in-depth article series on the difference between web search and enterprise search by Mark Bennet.

So how can we make search inside the firewall as good as web search? I think by connecting the information to the author. Trust builds between people based on their views of others. Simply put, someone has the authority over her peers either through rank (=organisation chart) or through trust. The trustworthiness can be based on the persons ability to connect to other people (we all probably know someone who knows “everyone”) or we trust someone based on the persons knowledge. More reading on the importance of trust in organisations. How to do this in practice? Some ideas in this post by BIll Ives. Also a good read: “How social is Enterprise Search?” by Jed Cawthorne. And finally another good post to read.

Metadata

By adding relevant metadata to information, we can make it more findable. There was discussions on the importance of strict and controlled metadata and how to handle user tagging. For an idea on how to think about metadata, read a blog post on how VGR used metadata by Kristian Norling.

Search Analytics

Before you start to do any major work with your current enterprise search solution, look at the search log files and analyze the data. You might be surprised in what you find. Search analytics is great if you want insight into what the user expects to find when they search. Watch this video for an introduction to Search Analytics in Practice.

Other subjects

  • Access control and transparency
  • Who owns search?
  • Who owns the information?
  • Personalization of search results
All these subjects and many more were discussed at the workshops, but that will have to wait for another blog post!
As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome!

Findwise at the J. Boye 12 conference [Updated]

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It is with great pleasure we can announce us as a partner of the J. Boye 12 conference in Aarhus (November 6-8). The J. Boye 12 is a conference focused around web and intranet to give practitioners and experts an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas and experiences in a professional, yet informal atmosphere.

Findwise will contribute to the conference with a speaker. Kristian Norling, our Market Communication manager, will give his view on future findability trends in “Enterprise Search and Findability Trends 2013” and will also offer an expert tutorial. The topic of the tutorial will be “Optimizing Your Content for Findability“.

Hope to see you there!

Video and results from the Enterprise Search and Findability Survey

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More than 200 people, primarily from Europe and North America, have responded to the Enterprise Search and Findability survey, providing a unique insight into how search is currently being managed, or rather is not being managed, in the best interest of the organisation. However, to get a deeper understanding in how search is used and managed at a regular basis in an enterprise context, search vendors and integrators have been excluded in this report, resulting in 170 unique responses from 28 countries globally.

A few findings

The survey has shown that the majority of the respondents find it difficult to find relevant information within the organization. To be more precise, 59.5 % of the respondents expressed that it is very/moderately hard to find the right information. Only 11.2% stated that it is fairly easy to search for information and as few as 2.8 % consider it very easy to find the desirable information. The ease of finding the right information clearly has a connection with the size of the organization. When looking at organizations with less than 1000 employees, one can see that 30.9% of the respondents feel that it is moderately/very hard to find the right information, while the corresponding percentage for organizations with 1001 or more employees is 77.3%.

The larger the organisation, the more information, and the more cumbersome it is to search and use the right information at the right time.

Video

Kristian Norling presents the findings from the global survey on Enterprise Search implementations. Presented at Enterprise Search Summit #ESS12 in New York, Enterprise Search Europe #ESEU in London, #IKS Workshop in Salzburg and Findability Day 2012 #findday12 in Stockholm. The slides are available here.

Findability day in Stockholm – search trends and customer insights

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Last Thursday about 50 of Findwise customers, friends and people from the industry gathered in Stockholm for a Findability day (#findday12). The purpose was simply to share experiences from choosing, implementing and developing search and findability solutions for all types of business and use cases.

Martin White, who has been in the intranet business since 1996, held the keynote speech about “Why business success depends on search”.
Among other things he spoke about why the work starts once search is implemented, how a search team should be staffed and what the top priority areas are for larger companies.
Martin has also published an article about Enterprise Search Team Management  that gives valuable insight in how to staff a search initiative. The latest research note from Martin White on Enterprise search trends and developments.

Henrik Sunnefeldt, SKF, and Joakim Hallin, SEB, were next on stage and shared their experiences from working with larger search implementations.
Henrik, who is program manager for search at SKF, showed several examples of how search can be applied within an enterprise (intranet, internet, apps, Search-as-a-Service etc) to deliver value to both employees and customers.
As for SEB, Joakim described how SEB has worked actively with search for the past two years. The most popular and successful implementation is a Global People Search. The presentation showed how SEB have changed their way of working; from country specific phone books to a single interface that also contains skills, biographies, tags and more.

During the day we also had the opportunity to listen to three expert presentations about Big data (by Daniel Ling and Magnus Ebbeson), Hydra – a content processing framework – video and presentation (by Joel Westberg) and Better Business, Protection & Revenue (by David Kemp from Autonomy).
As for Big data, there is also a good introduction here on the Findability blog.

Niklas Olsson and Patric Jansson from KTH came on stage at 15:30 and described how they have been running their swift-footed search project during the last year. There are some great learnings from working early with requirements and putting effort into the data quality.

Least, but not last, the day ended with Kristian Norling from Findwise who gave a presentation on the results from the Enterprise Search and Findability Survey. 170 respondents from all over the world filled out the survey during the spring 2012 that showed quite some interesting patterns.
Did you for example know that in many organisations search is owned either by IT (58%) or Communication (29%), that 45% have no specified budget for search and 48% of the participants have less than 1 dedicated person working with search?  Furtermore, 44,4% have a search strategy in place or are planning to have one in 2012/13.
The survey results are also discussed in one of the latest UX-postcasts from James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom.

Thank you to all presenters and participants who contributed to making Findability day 2012 inspiring!

We are currently looking into arranging Findability days in Copenhagen in September, Oslo in October and Stockholm early next spring. If you have ideas (speakers you would like to hear, case studies that you would like insight in etc), please let us know.

Presentation: Results from the Enterprise Search and Findability Survey

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This is a mashup of the presentations made at Enterprise Search Summit in New York, US on the 15th of May 2012 and at Enterprise Search Europe in London on the 30th of May 2012.

Global results are presented with numbers only, results from Europe and North America are clearly stated as such.

If you are interested in participating in the survey next year, please sign-up. All sign-ups will receive this years report.

Sign up for the Enterprise Search and Findability Survey 2013!
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View more presentations from Findwise

Reflections on Search at Intranets 2012 conference

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Despite large corporations spending hundreds of millions of euros creating information they spend almost nothing on search, Martin White said at the recent Intranets 2012 conference. But before dealing with this depressing fact, I would like to start on a more positive note.

Being a search professional it was an absolute joy to jump over to the other side of the fence and join the well over hundred intranet professionals at intranets 2012 in gorgeous Sydney. I whole heartedly recommend to search #intranets2012 on twitter to get a feel for the fun, inspiration and knowledge sharing that went on.

With sessions on collaboration, from recognized experts such as Michael Sampson, or by seasoned practitioners such as William Amurgis from American Electric Power, it was clear that social intranets are not only a buzz word but are already providing businesses with great value. Meanwhile James Robertson demanded that we raise the bar for design and usability from providing function to delivering pretty and simple intranets that surprise and delight. Mandy Geddes from Institute of Executive coaching gave me a brilliant idea of how to use private online communities to engage customers.

But in spite of returning from Sydney with a feeling of new energy, eagerness and almost urgency to get back to helping my customers and colleagues, I also realized that search was obviously not on everyone’s mind. Except for Martin White‘s excellent keynote only one session I attended to, Ausgrid Power‘s presentation of their intranet “the grid”, had search as a key area. Hopefully these few glimpses of light sparked something and I honestly think they do, bearing in mind the discussions I had in the breaks and in the fantastic social event Thursday evening.

After writing this to share my thinking, I have two things to say:

Findability ambassadors; our work has only begun and a I hope to see you all at Intranets 2013, because I’m sure going!

Data and Search Going Big?

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A few enterprise search specialists from Findwise recently attended the Scandinavian Developer Conference 2012. One of the tracks was Big Data, which is very much related to search. It had some interesting talks about how to handle large amounts of data in an efficient way. Special thanks to Theo Hultberg, Jim Webber and Tim Berglund!

The theme was that you should choose a storage system which is well suited for the task. This may seem like an obvious point, but for a long time this was simply ignored; I’m talking about the era of relational databases. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes a relational database is the very best for the job, but in many cases it isn’t.

Data is jagged by nature, i.e. not all objects have the same properties. This is why we shouldn’t force them to fit into a square table, instead everything should be denormalized! The application accessing the data will be aware of the information structure and will handle it accordingly. This will also avoid expensive assembly operations (such as joins) to get the data in the format we want when retrieving it. Why should you split up your data if you are going to assemble it over and over again? Also remember that disk space is cheap, pre-compute as much as possible. The design of a Big Data system should be governed by how the data will be retrieved.

Another step away from the relational databases is the relaxation of some of the ACID properties: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability. Again, this is along the lines of choosing the components best suited for the system. Decide which properties are a must have and which are not so important.

Relaxing the ACID properties, such as consistency, can give great performance gains. The NoSQL database Cassandra is eventually consistent and its write performance scales linearly up to 288 nodes (and probably even higher) which gives a write performance of over 1 million writes per second!

However, relaxation of these properties is not a new concept in the world of search engines. When indexing a document, it will usually take a number of seconds before it is searchable. This is called eventual consistency, i.e. the state of the search engine will be brought from one valid state to another, within a sufficiently long period of time. Do we really need documents that were just submitted to the search engine to be
searchable instantly? Most likely, no. Isolation is another property that is not crucial to a search engine. Since a document in an index doesn’t have any explicit relations to any other documents in the same index, there isn’t a great need for isolation. If two writes for the same document are submitted at the same time, there is probably something wrong in another part of the system.

So what does all this mean for search? There is an interesting challenge in storing jagged data in large amounts and then making good use out of it. To search in vast amounts jagged data, you need a lot of querytime field mappings (to make relevant data searchable) … or do you? There is also the issue of retaining a good relevancy model, which is absolutely vital to a search engine. How do you measure the relevance of arbitrary metadata and then weigh it all together? Maybe we need to think in new ways about relevance all together?

Whomever can solve these problems in a good way with a minimum amount of manual labor, is a name we’ll be hearing from a lot in the future.

A look at European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) 2012

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European Conference on Information Retrieval

The 34th European Conference on Information Retrieval was held  1-5 April 2011, in the lovely but crowded city of Barcelona, Spain. The core conference attracted over 100 attendees, with a total of 35 accepted full papers, 28 posters, and 7 demos being presented. As opposed to the previous year, which had 2 parallel sessions, this year’s conference included a single running session. The accepted papers covered a diverse range of topics, and were divided into query representation, blog and online-community search, semi-structured retrieval, applications, evaluation, retrieval models, classification, categorisation and clustering, image and video retrieval, and systems efficiency.

The best paper award went to Guido Zuccon, Leif Azzopardi, Dell Zhang and Jun Wang for their work entitled “Top-k Retrieval using Facility Location Analysis” and presented by Leif Azzopardi during the retrieval models session. The authors propose using facility location analysis taken from the discipline of operations research to address the top-k retrieval problem of finding “the optimal set of k documents from a number of relevant documents given the user’s query”.

Meanwhile, “Predicting IMDB Movie Ratings using Social Media” by Andrei Oghina, Mathias Breuss, Manos Tsagkias and Maarten de Rijke won the best poster award. With a different goal from the best paper, the authors of the poster experiment with a prediction model for rating movies using a set of qualitative and quantitative features extracted from the stream of two social media channels, YouTube and Twitter. Their findings show that the highest predictive performance is obtained by combining features from both channels, and propose as future work to include other social media channels.

Workshop Days

The conference was preceded by a full day of workshops and tutorials running in parallel. I attended two workshops: Information Retrieval Over Query Sessions (SIR) during the morning and Task-Based and Aggregated Search (TBAS) in the afternoon. The second workshop ended with an interactive discussion. A third, full-day workshop was Searching 4 Fun!.

Industry Day

The last day was the Industry Day. Only 2 papers here, plus 5 oral contributions, and around 50 attendees. A strong focus of the talks given at the industry day was on opinion-mining: four of the six participating companies/institutions presented work on sentiment analysis and opinion mining from social media streams. Jussi Karlgren, from Gavagai, argued that sentiment analysis from social media can be used by companies for example in finding reviews or comments made about their product or service, analyse their market position, and predict price movements. Rianne Kaptein, from Oxyme, backed this up by adding that businesses are interested by what the consumers say about their brand, products or campaigns on social media streams. Furthermore, Hugo Zaragoza from Websays identified two basic needs inside a company: a need for help in reading so that someone can act, and a need for help in explaining so that it can convince. Very interesting topic indeed, and research in this direction will advance as companies become more aware of the business gains from opinion mining of social media.

Overall, ECIR 2012 was a very inspiring conference. It also seemed a very friendly conference, offering many opportunities to network with the fellow attendees. Despite that, several participants said that the number of attendees at this year’s conference has decreased in comparison with previous years. The workshops and the core conference gave me the impression that it has a strong focus on young researchers, as many of the accepted contributions had a student as a first author and presenter at the conference. The fact that there was only one session running at a time was a good decision in my opinion, as the attendees were not forced to miss presentations. Nevertheless, the workshops and tutorials were running in parallel, and although the proceedings of the workshops will be made freely available, I still feel that I missed something that day. The industry day was very exciting, offering the opportunity to share ideas between academia and industry. However, there were not so many presentations, and the topics were not as diverse. I propose that next year Findwise will be among the speakers at the Industry track!

ECIR 2013 will be held in Moscow, Russia, between 24-28 March. See you there!