Tag Archives: search engine optimization

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.

Google Search Appliance (GSA) 6.10 released

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Last week, Google released version 6.10 of the software to their Google Search Appliance (GSA).

This is a minor update and the focus at the Google teams has been bug fixes and increased stability. Looking at the release notes, there’s indeed plenty of bugs that has been solved.

However, there are also some new features in this release. Some of the more interesting, in my opinion, are:

Multiple front-end configuration for Dynamic Navigation

Since the 6.8 release, the GSA has been able to provde facets, or Dynamic Navigation as Google calls it. However the facets has been global so you couldn’t have two front ends with different facets. This is now possible.
More feeds statistics and Adjust PageRank in feeds
More statistics of what’s happening with feeds you push into the GSA is a very welcome feature. The possibility to adjus PageRank allows for some more control over relevancy in feeds.

Indexing Crawl time kerberos support and Indexing large files

Google is working hard on security and every release since 6.0 has included some security improvements. Nice to see that it continues. Since beginning, the GSA has simply dropped files bigger than 30 MB. Now it will index larger (you can configure how large), but still only the first 2.5 MB of the content will be indexed.

Stopword lists for differented languages

Scalability Centralized configuration

For a multi-node GSA setup, you can now specify the configuration on the master and it’s propagated to the slaves

For a complete list of new features, see the New and Changed Features page in the documentation

Google Instant – Can a Search Engine Predict What We Want?

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On September 8th Google released a new feature for their search engine: Google instant.
If you haven’t seen it yet, there is an introduction on Youtube that is worth spending 1:41 minutes on.

Simply put, Google instant is a new way of displaying results and helping users find information faster. As you type, results will be presented in the background. In most cases it is enough to write two or three characters and the results you expect are already right in front of you.

Google instant

The Swedish site Prisjakt has been using this for years, helping the users to get a better precision in their searches.

At Google you have previously been guided by “query suggestion” i.e. you got suggestions of what others have searched for before – a function also used by other search engines such as Bing (called Type Ahead). Google instant is taking it one step further.

When looking at what the blog community has to say about the new feature it seems to split the users in two groups; you either hate it or love it.

So, what are the consequences? From an end-user perspective we will most likely stop typing if something interesting appears that draws our attention. The result?
The search results shown at the very top will generate more traffic , it will be more personalized over time and we will most probably be better at phrasing our queries better.

From an advertising perspective, this will most likely affect the way people work with search engine optimization. Some experts, like Steve Rubel, claims Google instant will make SEO irrelevant, wheas others, like Matt Cutts think it will change people behavior in a positive way over time  and explains why.

What Google is doing is something that they constantly do: change the way we consume information. So what is the next step?

CNN summarizes what the Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google says:

“The next step of search is doing this automatically. When I walk down the street, I want my smartphone to be doing searches constantly: ‘Did you know … ?’ ‘Did you know … ?’ ‘Did you know … ?’ ‘Did you know … ?’ ”

Schmidt said at the IFA consumer electronics event in Berlin, Germany, this week.

“This notion of autonomous search — to tell me things I didn’t know but am probably interested in — is the next great stage, in my view, of search.”

Do you agree? Can we predict what the users want from search? Is this the sort of functionality that we want to use on the web and behind the firewall?

Relevance is Important – and Relevant

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A couple of weeks ago I read an interesting blog post about comparing the relevance of three different search engines. This made me start thinking of relevance and how it’s sometimes overlooked when choosing or implementing a search engine in a findability solution. Sometimes a big misconception is that if we just install a search engine we will get splendid search results out of the box. While it’s true that the results will be better than an existing database based search solution, the amount of configuration needed to get splendid results is based on how good relevance you get from the start. And as seen in the blog post, it can be quite a bit of different between search engines and relevance is important.

So what is relevance and why does it differ between search engines? Computing relevance is the core of a search engine. Essentially the target is to deliver the most relevant set of results with regards to your search query. When you submit your query, the search engine is using a number of algorithms to find, within all indexed content, the documents or pages that best corresponds to the query. Each search engine uses it’s own set of algorithms and that is why we get different results.

Since the relevance is based on the content it will also differ from company to company. That’s why we can’t say that one search engine has better relevance than the other. We can just say that it differs. To know who performs the best, you have to try it out on your own content. The best way to choose a search engine for your findability solution would thus be to compare a couple and see which yields the best results. After comparing the results, the next step would then be to look at how easy it is to tune the relevance algorithms, to what extent it is possible and how much you need to tune. Based on how good relevance you get from the start you might not need to do much relevance tuning, thus you don’t need the “advanced relevance tuning functionality” that might cost extra money.

In the end, the best search engine is not the one with most functionality. The best one is the one that gives you the most relevant results, and by choosing a search engine with good relevance for your content some initial requirements might be obsolete which will save you time and money.