The search experience in SharePoint 2013: customised or targeted?

Posted on May 30, 2014 by

This post is the fourth in a series of four articles providing several best practices on how to implement and customise the search experience in SharePoint 2013. The previous posts listed the differences between the cloud and on-premise SharePoint, provided considerations when upgrading to SharePoint 2013, and dealt with the practicalities of configuring search in SharePoint Online. This fourth post handles the more advanced topic of ranking results and the future of search in SharePoint.

Managing ranking

We’ve previously mentioned the query rules as a way to change the ranking of the search results based on your requirements. These allow the promotion of certain search results or search result blocks on top of the ranked searched results, and more advanced query rules allow even changing the ranking of the search results based on what the query terms are.

By using query rules, customising the search results web part, and a few content by search web parts, you can change the behaviour of the search depending on what user is accessing it. That is, you would also need good metadata to make this work, but having a complete user profile (including the job title, department, and interests) is a good start. Based on such user information, you can define how the search experience for that user will be.

Changing ranking using query rules, however, requires a query rule condition, which describes the prerequisites that the query must fulfil in order for the query rule to fire. For changing the results for all queries, you can use the next approach.

If the default ranking does not satisfy your search requirements and you want to change the order of the ranked search results, SharePoint provides the possibility of changing the ranking models. It is a feature available in SharePoint Online as well, as described in the TechNet documentation: “SharePoint Online customers need to download and install the free Rank Model Tuning App in order to create and customize ranking models.”

A ranking model contains the features and corresponding weights that are used in calculating a score for each search result. Changing the ranking models might require a deeper and theoretical knowledge of how search works, and those that take the challenge of changing the ranking model are often dedicated search administrators or external specialised consultants.

The Ranking Model Tuning app is free on the App Store

The Rank Model Tuning App provides a user interface for creating custom ranking models, and can be used for both SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server, though in SharePoint 2013 Server there is also the possibility to use PowerShell to customise ranking models. New models are based on existing ranking models for which you can add or remove new rank features and tune the weight of a rank feature. It also allows for evaluating the new ranking model using a test set of queries. The set of test queries can be constructed from real queries made by users that can be gathered from previous search logs, for example. How to use the tuning app is explained step-by-step in the documentation on the Office site.

Changing the weight of certain file types (say for example for PowerPoint documents compared to Excel documents) might be enough for many search implementations, but depending on the content, the features that influence the ranking of the search results can become more elaborate. For example, a property defining whether documents are either official or work-in-progress might become an important factor in determining the ranking of search results. SharePoint provides the liberty to create new properties, so it makes sense that these can be used in search to improve the relevance.

It should be pointed out, however, that changing the ranking model influences all searches that are run using that ranking model. Though the main idea of changing the ranking model is to improve the ranking, it can become much too easy to make changes that can have an undesirable effect on the ranking. This is why a proper evaluation of ranking changes needs to be part of your plan for improving search relevance.

The office graph and the future of social

The social features introduced in SharePoint 2013 provide a rich social experience, which is interconnected with the search experience. Many social features are driven by search (such as the recommendations for which people or documents to follow), and social factors also affect the search (such as finding the right expertise from conversations in your network).

In the month of June 2012 Microsoft acquired the social enterprise platform Yammer. The SharePoint Server 2013 Preview has been made available for download since July 2012, and it reached Release to Manufacturing (RTM) in October the same year. The new SharePoint 2013 implements new social features (see for example the newsfeed, the new mysites and the tagging system), many of which are overlapping with those available in Yammer! This brings us to the question on everyone’s mind since the acquisition of Yammer: what is the future of social in SharePoint? Should you use SharePoint’s social features or use Yammer?

In March 2014, Microsoft announced that they will not include new features in the SharePoint Social but rather invest in the integration between Yammer and Office 365. The guidance is thus to go for Yammer.

“Go Yammer! While we’re committed to another on-premises release of SharePoint Server—and we’ll maintain its social capabilities—we don’t plan on adding new social features. Our investments in social will be focused on Yammer and Office 365” – Jared Spataro, Microsoft Office blog

Also at the SharePoint conference this March 2014, Microsoft introduced the Office Graph, and with it Oslo as the first app demo using it. During the keynote, Microsoft mentions that the Office Graph is “perhaps the biggest idea we’ve had since the beginning of SharePoint”. The office graph maps relationships between people, the documents they authored, the likes and posts they made, and the emails they received; it’s actually an extension of Yammer’s enterprise graph. The Oslo application is leveraging the graph, in a way that looks familiar from Facebook’s graph search.

The Office Graph, connecting people and information – Microsoft Office Blog

The new Office Graph provides exciting opportunities, and has consequences for how the search will be used. Findwise started exploring the area of enterprise graph search before Microsoft announced the Office Graph – see our post about the Enterprise Graph Search from January 2013.

Reluctant to go for the cloud?

Microsoft has hinted during the SharePoint conference keynote in March that they will be adding new functionalities to the cloud version first. Although they are still committed to another version of SharePoint server, new updates might come at a slower pace for the on-premise version. However, Microsoft also announced that with the SharePoint SP1 there is a new functionality in the administrative interface: a hybrid setting which allows you to specify whether you want the social component in the cloud/Yammer, or your documents on OneDrive, so that you don’t need to move everything to the cloud overnight.

Let us know how far you’ve come with your SharePoint implementation! Contact us if you need help in deciding which version of SharePoint to choose, need help with tuning search relevance, have questions about improving search, or would like to work with us to reach the next level of findability.

Query Rules in SharePoint 2013

Posted on February 27, 2013 by

Leaving both the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas and the recent European SharePoint Conference in Copenhagen behind, Findwise continues sharing impressions about the new search in SharePoint 2013! We have previously given an overview of what is new in search in SharePoint 2013 and discussed Microsoft’s focus areas for the release. In this post, we focus more on the ranking of the search results using the query rules.

Understanding user intent in search is one of the key developments in the new release. The screenshots below, showing out-of-the-box functionality on some sample content, exemplify how the search engine adapts to the user query. Keywords such as ‘deck’, ‘expert’, or ‘video’ can express the user’s needs and expectations for different search results and information types, and what the search engine does in this case is promoting those results that have a higher probability to be relevant to the user’s search.

Source: Microsoft

The adaptability of the search results can seem remarkable, as we see in these examples, aiming to provide more relevant search results through a better understanding of the user intent. Actually, this is powered by a new feature in SharePoint 2013 called query rules. Even more interesting maybe is that you can define your own custom query rules matching your specific needs without writing any code!

The simplest query rule would be to promote a specific result for a given search query. For example, you can promote a product’s instruction manual when the users search for that product name. Previously, in SharePoint 2010, you were able to define such promoted results (or “best bets”) using the Search Keywords. The query rules in SharePoint 2013 extend this functionality, providing an easy way to create powerful search experiences that adapt to user intent and business needs.

When defining a query rule, there are two main things to consider: conditions and corresponding actions. The conditions specify when the rule will be applied and the actions specify what to do when the rule is matched. There are six different condition types and three action types that can be defined.

For example, a query condition can be that a query keyword matches a specified phrase or a term from a dictionary (such as ‘picture’, ‘download’ or a product name from the term store), or that the query is more popular for a certain result type (such as images when for example searching for ‘cameras’), or that it matches a given regular expression (useful for matching phone numbers for example). The correlated actions can consist of promoting individual results on top of the ranked search results (promoting for example the image library), promoting a group of search results (such as image results, or search results federated from a web search engine), or changing the ranking of the search results by modifying the query (by changing the sorting of results or filtering on a content type). Another thing to consider is where you define the rule. Query rules can be created at Search Service Application, Site Collection, or Site level. The rules are inherited by default but you can remove, add, configure and change the order of query rules at each level. Fortunately, it also allows you to test a query and see which rules will fire.

There is one more thing though that you need to take into account: some features of query rules are limited in some of the licensing plans. Some plans only allow you to add the promoted results, and the more advanced actions on query rules are disabled. Check TechNet for guidelines on managing query rules and a list of features available across different licensing plans.

With the query rules, you have the freedom and power to change the search experience and adapt it to your needs. Defining the right keywords to be matched on the user queries and mapping the conditions with the relevant actions is easy but the process must undoubtedly be well managed. The management of the query rules should definitely be part of your SharePoint 2013 search governance strategy.

Let’s have a chat about how you can create great search experiences that match your specific users and business needs!

Video: Search Analytics in Practice

Posted on May 9, 2012 by

Search Analytics in Practice from Findwise on Vimeo.

This presentation is about how to use search analytics to improve the search experience. A small investment in time and effort can really improve the search on your intranet or website. You will get practical advice on what metrics to look at and what actions can be taken as a result of the analysis.

Video in swedish “Sökanalys i praktiken”.

The presentation was recorded in Gothenburg on the 4th of May 2012.

The presentation featured in the video:

Search Analytics in Practice

View more presentations from Findwise

Video interview: How to Improve the Search Experience

Posted on March 15, 2012 by

Video interview with Kristian Norling at the Intrateam Event in Copenhagen 2012. Kristian talks about his former work at VGR and what he thinks is important for improving the search experience.

Watch the video

Bridging the Gap Between People and (Enterprise Search) Technology

Posted on December 6, 2010 by

Tony Russell-Rose recently wrote about the changing face of search, a post that summed up the discussion about the future of enterprise search that took part at the recent search solutions conference. This is indeed an interesting topic. My colleague Ludvig also touched on this topic in his recent post where he expressed his disappointment in the lack of visionary presentations at this year’s KMWorld conference.

At our last monthly staff meeting we had a visit from Dick Stenmark, associate professor of Informatics at the Department of Applied IT at Gothenburg University. He spoke about his view on the intranets of the future. One of the things he talked about was the big gap in between the user’s vague representation of her information need (e.g. the search query) and the representation of the documents indexed by the intranet enterprise search engine. If a user has a hard time defining what it is she is looking for it will of course be very hard for the search engine to interpret the query and deliver relevant results. What is needed, according to Dick Stenmark, is a way to bridge the gap between technology (the search engine) and people (the users of the search engine).

As I see it there are two ways you can bridge this gap:

Help users become better searchers
Customize search solutions to fit the needs of different user groups

Helping users become better searchers

I have mentioned this topic in one of my earlier posts. Users are not good at describing which information they are seeking, so it is important that we make sure the search solutions help them do so. Already existing functionalities, such as query completion and related searches, can help users create and use better queries.

Query completion often includes common search terms, but what if we did combine them with the search terms we would have wanted them to search for? This requires that you learn something about your users and their information needs. If you do take the time to learn about this it is possible to create suggestions that will help the user not only spell correctly, but also to create a more specific query. Some search solutions (such as homedepot.com) also uses a sort of query disambiguation, where the user’s search returns not only results, but a list of matching categories (where the user is asked to choose which category of products her search term belongs). This helps the search engine return not only the correct set of results, but also display the most relevant set of facets for that product category. Likewise, Google displays a list of related searches at the bottom of the search results list.

These are some examples of functionalities that can help users become better searchers. If you want to learn some more have a look at Dan Russells presentation linked from my previous post.

Customize search solutions to fit the needs of different user groups

One of the things Dick Stenmark talked about in his presentation for us at Findwise was how different users’ behavior is when it comes to searching for information. Users both have different information needs and also different ways of searching for information. However, when it comes to designing the experience of finding information most companies still try to achieve a one size fits all solution. A public website can maybe get by supporting 90% of its visitors but an intranet that only supports part of the employees is a failure. Still very few companies work with personalizing the search applications for their different user groups. (Some don’t even seem to care that they have different user groups and therefore treat all their users as one and the same.) The search engine needs to know and care more about its’ users in order to deliver better results and a better search experience as a whole. For search to be really useful personalization in some form is a must, and I think and hope we will see more of this in the future.

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

Posted on September 26, 2010 by

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.

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?

Findability and the Google Experience

Posted on September 2, 2010 by

In almost every findability project we work on, users ask us why finding information on their intranet is not as easy as finding information on Google. One of my team members told me he was once asked:

”If Google can search the whole internet in less than a second, how come you can’t search our internal information which is only a few million documents?”

I don’t remember his answer but I do remember what he said he would have wanted to answer:

”Google doesn’t have to handle rigorous security. We do. Google has got millions of servers all around the world. We have got one.”

The truth is, you get the search experience you deserve. Google delivers an excellent user experience to millions of users because they have thousands of employees working hard to achieve this. So do the other players in the search market. All the search engines are continuously working on improving the user experience for the users. It is possible to achieve good things without a huge budget. But I can guarantee you that just installing any of the search platforms on the market and then doing nothing will not result in a good experience for your users. So the question is; what is your company doing to achieve good findability, a good search experience?

Jeff Carr from Earley & Associates recently published a 2 part article about this desire to duplicate the Google experience, and why it won’t succeed. I recommend that you read it. Hopefully it will not only help you meet the questions and expectations from your users; it will also help you in how you can improve the search experience for them.

Enterprise Search and why we can’t just get Google.

Quick Website Diagnostics with Search Analytics

Posted on June 3, 2010 by

I have recently been giving courses directed to web editors on how to successfully apply search technology on a public web site. One of the things we stress is how to use search analytics as a source of user feedback. Search analytics is like performing a medical checkup. Just as physicians inspect patients in search of maladious symptoms, we want to be able to inspect a website in search of problems hampering user experience. When such symptoms are discovered a reasonable resolution is prescribed.

Search analytics is a vast field but as usual a few tips and tricks will take you a long way. I will describe three basic analysis steps to get you started. Search usage on public websites can be collected and inspected using an array of analytics toolkits, for example Google Analytics.

How many users are using search?

For starters, have a look at how many of your users are actually using search. Obviously having a large portion of users doing so means that search is becoming very important to your business. A simple conclusion stemming from such evidence is that search simply has to work satisfactorily, otherwise a large portion of your users are getting disappointed.

Having many searchers also raises some questions. Are users using search because they want to or because they are forced to, because of tricky site navigation for example? If you feel that the latter seems reasonable you may find that as you improve site navigation your number of searchers will decrease while overall traffic hopefully increases.

Just as with high numbers, low numbers can be ambiguous. Low scores especially coupled with a good amount of overall site traffic may mean that users don’t need search in order to find what they are looking for. On the other hand it may mean that users haven’t found the search box yet, or that the search tool is simply too complicated for the average user.

Aside from the business, knowing how popular search is can be beneficial to you personally. It’s a great feeling to know that you are responsible for one of the most used subsystems of your site. Rub it in the face of your colleague!

From where are searches being initiated?

One of the first recommendations you will get when implementing a search engine for your web site is to include the search box on each and every page, preferably in a standardized easy-to-find place like the top right corner. The point of having the search box available wherever your users happen to be is to enable them to search, typically after they have failed to find what they are looking for through browsing.

Now that we know that search is being conducted everywhere, we should be keeping an eye out for pages that frequently emit searches. Knowing what those pages are will let us improve the user experience by altering or completing the information there.

Which are the most common queries?

The most frequently issued queries to a search system make up a significant amount of the total number of served queries. These are known as head queries. By improving the quality of search for head queries you can offer a better search experience to a large amount of users.

A simple but effective way of working with search tuning is this. For each of the 10, 20 or 50 most frequent queries to the system:

Imagine what the user was looking for when typing that query
Perform that query yourself
Examine the 5-10 top results in the result list:
- Do you think that the user was content with those results
- If yes, pat your back 🙂
- If not, tweak using synonyms or best bets.

Go through this at least once a month. If the information on your site is static you might not need to change a lot of things every time, but if your content is changing or the behavior of the users you may need to adjust a few things.

Combining Search and Browse – Integrated Faceted Breadcrumbs

Posted on April 16, 2010 by

Finding information can be tricky and as I have written about in one of my previous posts improving findability is not about providing a single entrypoint to information. Users have different ways of finding information (browsing, searching and asking). They often combine these techniques with each other (berrypicking) and so they all need to be supported. Peter Morville states that.

“Browse and Search work best in tandem… the best finding interfaces achieve a balance, letting users move fluidly between browsing and searching.”

A lot of sites are improving their search experience through the implementation of faceted search. However, very few successfully integrate faceted search and browsing on their site. Searching and browsing are treated as two separate flows of interaction instead of trying to combine them which would provide the users with a much better experience.

That is why I was glad to learn about an idea from Greg Nudelman which he presented in his session at the IASummit which I attended last week. In his session Greg introduced his idea about Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb. According to him breadcrumbs are intuitive, flexible and resourceful and they are design elements that don’t cause problems but simply work. To test his idea he conducted usability tests on a prototype using the Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb. According to his evaluation the integrated faceted breadcrumb has a lot of advantages over other faceted solutions:

Combine hierarchical Location & Attribute breadcrumbs
Use Change instead of Set-Remove-Set
Automatically retain relevant query information
Label breadcrumb aspects
Make it clear how to start a new search
Allow direct keyword manipulation.

I find this idea interesting and I am currently thinking about whether it could be applied into one of my own projects. (According to Greg it has not been implemented anywhere yet even though the findings from the usability testing were positive.) However I wonder if this is a concept that works well only for sites with relatively homogeneous content or if it would also work on larger collections of sites such as intranets? Can it be used in an intuitive way with a large number of facets and can it cope with the use of more complex filtering functionalities? For some sites it might not be the best idea to keep the search settings when the user changes search terms. These are some things I would like to find out. What do you think about this? Could you apply it to your site(s)? I recommend that you have a look at Greg Nudelman’s presentation on slideshare and find out for yourself. You can also find an article about the Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb on Boxes and Arrows. I look forward to a discussion about whether this is any good so write me a comment here at the findability blog or find me on twitter.

Faceted Search by LinkedIn

Posted on March 12, 2010 by

My RSS feeds have been buzzing about the LinkedIn faceted search since it was first released from beta in December. So why is the new search at LinkedIn so interesting that people are almost constantly discussing it? I think it’s partly because LinkedIn is a site that is used by most professionals and searching for people is core functionality on LinkedIn. But the search interface on LinkedIn is also a very good example of faceted search.

I decided to have a closer look into their search. The first thing I realized was just how many different kinds of searches there are on LinkedIn. Not only the obvious people search but also, job, news, forum, group, company, address book, answers and reference search. LinkedIn has managed to integrate search so that it’s the natural way of finding information on the site. People search is the most prominent search functionality but not the only one.

I’ve seen several different people search implementations and they often have a tendency to work more or less like phone books. If you know the name you type it and get the number. And if you’re lucky you can also get the name if you only have the number. There is seldom anyway to search for people with a certain competence or from a geographic area. LinkedIn sets a good example of how searching for people could and should work.

LinkedIn has taken careful consideration of their users; What information they are looking for, how they want it presented and how they need to filter searches in order to find the right people. The details that I personally like are the possibility to search within filters for matching options (I worked on a similar solution last year) and how different filters are displayed (or at least in different order) depending on what query the user types. If you want to know more about how the faceted search at LinkedIn was designed, check out the blog post by Sara Alpern.

But LinkedIn is not only interesting because of the good search experience. It’s also interesting from a technical perspective. The LinkedIn search is built on open source so they have developed everything themselves. For those of you interested in the technology behind the new LinkedIn search I recommend “LinkedIn search a look beneath the hood”, by Daniel Tunkelang where he links to a presentation by John Wang search architect at LinkedIn.

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the enterprise search and findability blog by Tietoevry Findwise

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