Tag Archives: search platforms

Metadata in Focus for Our Findability Solution

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Last week Kristian Norling wrote a blog post about how they work with metadata at Västra Götalands Regionen (VGR). In the beginning of his post he states that metadata is boring, but extremely useful. A teacher in statistics that I had in college used to say that statistics is the most boring thing there is. It’s the things that you can do with statistics that makes it really interesting. So I agree with both of them, the metadata (or statistics) in itself is quite boring, but the things you can do with it is what makes it all worth it. The quality and structure of information must also be in focus when creating Findability solutions that aim to provide easy access to all information inside and outside the firewall.

Findwise is currently working on improving our findability solution which is our intranet. When we investigated our own business and user needs we learned that there is a need for a more flexible way of organizing information so it can be found from different entrypoints as well as in different contexts. Therefore one of the things at the heart of our intranet (except the search functionality off course) is metadata. As a fast growing  (and changing) company we find it hard to create and maintain one single information hierarchy that is intuitive and self-evident to all our employees.  Instead we are working with a taxonomy with a simple set of categories and concepts. All content is tagged with what, where and who.

Who describes which people or groups are allowed to see a document. It can be everyone, a single person or a group of people such as the finance department, or a project team. Since knowledge sharing is very important for our organization most of the information is open for everyone to see and use.

Where describes which sites the content should be visible on. A single document can be visible on several sites. So if contact details for a customer is relevant to show on several projects for that customer the same content can be displayed on all the different project sites, without us having to store duplicate versions of the content.

What describes the concepts the content relates to. These concepts include customers, projects, products & competences, information types as well as categories that are created through the means of user generated tagging. This way one single document does not have to belong to one specific site or folder, but can be displayed in several different and all relevant locations on the intranet. Thanks to this use of metadata it is also possible to use the different categories for search and faceted navigation. For example I can view all design specifications from different customer projects that include the concept faceted navigation, or all information about how to work with search analytics with the search platform Autonomy IDOL. The concepts and the information becomes the focus instead of the location where it is stored.

In the first stage this will be done manually as content is added to the intranet. In the future it would also be of interest for us to utilize the same type of service that we developed for VGR, for our own content. But instead of using controlled vocabularies such as MeSH we use our own taxonomy and the power of search technology to suggest or automatically add appropriate customers, projects and categories for a document. A first step in this will probably be to use entity extraction techniques to identify and automatically tag already existing documents with concepts such as customers and search platforms.

We hope to share our experiences from this project with you in the future. In the mean while I recommend that you read Kristian’s post about how they use different types of keyword metadata at VGR.

Findability and the Google Experience

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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.

Real Time Search in the Enterprise

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Real time search is a big fuzz in the global network called Internet. Major search engines like Google and Bing are now providing users with real time search results from Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and other social media sites. Real time search means that as soon as content are created or updated, it is immediately searchable. This might be obvious and seems like a basic requirement, but working with search you know that this is not the case most of the time. Looking inside the firewall, in the enterprise, I dare to say that real time search is far from common. Sometimes content is not changed very frequently so it is not necessary to make it instantly searchable. Though, in many cases it’s the technical architecture that limits a real time search implementation.

The most common way of indexing content is by using a web crawler or a connector. Either way, you schedule them to go out and fetch new/updated/deleted content at specific interval during the day. This is the basic architecture for search platforms these days. The advantage of this approach is that the content systems does not need to adapt to the search platform, they just deliver content through their ordinary API:s during indexing. The drawback is that new or updated content is not available until next scheduled indexing. Depending on the system this might take several hours. Due to several reasons, mostly performance, you do not want to schedule connectors or web crawlers to fetch content too often. Instead, to provide real time search you have to do the other way around; let the content system push content to the search platform.

Most systems have some sort of event system that triggers an event when content is created/updated/deleted. Listening for these events, the system can send the content to the search platform at the same time it’s stored in the content system. The search platform can immediately index the pushed content and make it searchable. This requires adaptation of the content system towards the search platform. In this case though, I think the advantages outweighs the disadvantages. Modern content systems of today are (or should be) providing a plug-in architecture so you should fairly easy be able to plug in this kind of code. These plug-ins could also be provided by the search platform vendors just as ordinary connectors are provided today.

Do you agree, or have I been living in a cave for the past years? I’d love to hear you comments on this subject!