Archive for the ‘Search’ Category

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Mattias Brunnert

Why web search is like a store clerk

February 4 - 2011 | Mattias Brunnert

When someone is using the search function on your web site, it tells you two things. First of all they have a specific need, expressed by their search query. Second, and more importantly he or she wants you to fulfill that need. If users didn’t care where the service was delivered from, they would have gone straight to Google. Hence, the use of your search function signals trust in your capabilities. This means that even if the majority of your website visitors doesn’t use the search function, you know that the ones who do have a commitment to you. Imagine you are working in a store as a clerk; the customer coming up to you and asking you something is probably more interested in doing business with you than the ones just browsing the goods.

This trust however, can easily be turned to frustration and bad will if the search result is poor and users don’t find what they are looking for. Continuing our analogy with the store, this is much like the experience of looking for a product, wandering around for a few minutes, finally deciding to ask a clerk and getting the answer “If it’s not on the shelf we don’t have it”. I certainly would leave the store and the same applies for a web site. If users fail when browsing and searching, then they will probably leave your site. The consequence is that you might antagonize loyal customers or loose an easy sale. So how do you recognize a bad search function? A good way to start is to look at common search queries and try searching for them yourself. Then start asking a few basic questions such as:

  • Does the sorting of the search results make sense?
  • Is it possible to decide which result is interesting based on the information in the result presentation?
  • Is there any possibility to continue navigating the results if the top hits are not what you are looking for?

Answering these questions yourself will tell you a lot about how your search is performing. The first step to a good user experience is to know where your challenges are, then you can start making changes to improve the issues you have found in order to make your customers happier. After all, who wants to be the snarky store clerk?

Caroline Abrahamsson

Gartner and the magic quadrants – crowning the leaders of Enterprise Search

January 25 - 2011 | Caroline Abrahamsson

For years Gartner, the research and advisory company, has been publishing their magic quadrants – and their verdict of everything from ECM-systems to Data Warehouse and E-commerce plays a big role in many company’s decision to choose the right tools.
Simply put, the vendors are presented in a matrix measuring the different players by ability to execute (product, overall viability, customer experience etc.) and the completeness of their vision (offering strategy, innovation etc.). The vendors are then positioned as niche players (a rather crowded spot), visionaries, challengers and leaders.

At the end of last year Gartner decided to retire their old “Information Access Quadrant” and introduce “Enterprise Search MarketScope” due to a more mature market. A number of vendors (such as Vivisimo and Recommind) were removed, in order to exclude those whose businesses were not entirely search driven.

The evaluation criteria’s for MarketScope cover: offering (product) strategy, Innovation, Overall viability (business unit, financial, strategy, and organization), Customer experience, Market understanding and business model.
To summarize: the criteria’s are to a large extent the same, but the two areas “overall viability” and “customer experience” are weighted higher than the rest. This is most likely a result of the last years discussion around user friendly interfaces, easier administration and the fact that some customers have suffered quite bad when vendors do not survive (one example in Northen Europe is the Danish vendor that went bankrupted for some time)

The yearly fight between the three leaders; Microsoft, Endeca and Autonomy has been somewhat disrupted and Microsoft, Endeca and Google are now seen as the leaders.
Microsoft has got a very broad product line, which stretches from low-price and less functionality to Enterprise Search built on the former FAST technology. Endeca follow the same trend, as Gartner puts it their “products (are) intended to serve organizations seeking to develop general search installations..(..) broadly applicable for a variety of different search challenges”.
In the old quadrant, Google remained a “challenger” for quite some time – but never made it to the “leaders” corner. Ease of administration and “user friendly” are two words that keeps being repeated. That, in combination with a profit of $ 7290000000 during the last quarter of 2010 makes Google a player that easily can continue to develop their Enterprise business.

Gartner's MarketScope for Enterprise Search

 

Autonomy should still not be disregarded, the main reason for it falling a bit behind the three others seem to be conquerable problems with support and pricing transparency. It will be interesting to see how Autonomy chooses to handle these issues during 2011.

To put it short: the new MarketScope is good reading with quite few surprises. If you wish to get a better understanding of the development going on at the different vendors, start with Gartner and continue to search among our blog posts.

Tobias Berg

The difference between Search and Find

January 23 - 2011 | Tobias Berg

Is “Findability” only a buzzword to describe the same thing as before when talking about search solutions, or does it bring something new to the discussion? I’d like to think the latter and this week I read a blog post describing the difference between search and findability in a very good way. I couldn’t have written it better myself :)

For the lazy one, I’ve picked a quote that is the key element in the post:

Findability: introducing the robot waiter

Imagine you’re in a futuristic restaurant and when the robot waiter approaches, you ask for ‘ham and cheese omelette’. In response he just shrugs his robotic shoulders and says ‘not found – please try again.’ You then have to keep guessing until you find a match for something you’d like to order.

Now imagine a second futuristic restaurant where the robot waiter says ‘Mr Grimes, how lovely to see you, the last time you visited you had A and B and gave them a 5 star rating. People who ordered x, also ordered y and found that the wines a, b and c went really well with it.’At first restaurant the menu was searchable (though regretably the ‘ham and cheese omelette’ query didn’t match anything), at the second restaurant the menu was findable.

To me, this analogy is spot-on. I dare to say that making content searchable is more of a technical issue while reaching great findability requries understanding of the business. Why is that?

Well, making a content repository searchable you “only” need to hook up a connector, index the repository and display a search box to the users. To succeed with this, it doesn’t matter if the content is movie reviews, user manuals, reciepes, a product catalog or whatever. What you need to know is the format of the repository (is it a SQL database, filesystem, ECM, etc.).

But if you want your users to find what they want in your repositories, business knowledge is a requirement. It’s true that you help your users find information by implementing technical stuff likequery completion, facets, did-you-mean, synonym dictionaries, etc. But if they are to be of any help you need to present facets that are useful, populate the synonym dictionary with terms used in your organisation,etc. For example, a good synonym file targeted towards nurses and doctors would be very different compared to one targeted at employees at an insurance company.

Caroline Abrahamsson

Findability blog: Wrapping up 2010

December 23 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

Christmas is finally here and at Findwise we are taking a few days off to spend time with family and friends.

During 2010 we’ve delivered more than 25 successful projects, arranged breakfast seminars to talk about customer solutions (based on Microsoft, IBM, Autonomy and Open source), meet-ups in a number of cities as well as networking meetings for profound Findability discussions and moving in parties for our new offices.

At our Findability blog we have been discussing technology and vendor solutions (Microsoft and FAST, Autonomy, IBM, Google and open source), reasearch,  conferences, customized solutions and how to find a balance between technology and people.

Some of our posts have resulted in discussions, both on our own blog and in other forums. Please get involved in some of the previous ongoing discussions on “Solr Processing Pipeline”,  “Search and Business Intelligence” or “If a piece of content is never read, does it exist?”  if you have thoughts to share.

Findability blog is taking a break and we will be back with new posts is January.

If you have some spare time during the vacation some of customers run their own blogs, and good reading tips within Findability are the blogs driven by Kristian Norling (VGR) and Alexandra Larsson (Swedish armed forces).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Mattias Brunnert

If a piece of content is never read, does it exist?

December 10 - 2010 | Mattias Brunnert

Since ancient times, information technology has developed from carvings in rock and wood to cell phones and Facebook. Still, the basic purpose remains the same; to facilitate communication between people separated by space and time. Therefore one can measure the successfulness of any information tool by two axes: how easy it is to create information and how easy it is to consume it. Being a Findability expert, I spend a large part of my life focusing on the latter. Therefore it troubles me that so many organizations wait so long when they are introducing new content management systems before looking at search. If I had a nickel for every time I heard “we are currently busy with building our new intranet/web page/collaboration tool and will look at search when the project is finished” I would definitely have had a few quarters by now.

I like to say that I am in the information marketing business. What I mean by that is that Findability is all about marketing information so that the consumers, your employees, can find the piece of information they need. And just as an industrialist would not construct a factory before doing a marketing plan, you should not build a new information repository without thinking about how the content created in that repository will reach its target audience. When marketing information, search is one of your most important channels.

While a search solution can definitely smooth out imperfections in information structure and quality using intelligent algorithms, spending a little time thinking about how you can make it easier for a search engine to deliver relevant results presented in a user friendly way can really make it shine. Some questions you can ask yourself are:

  • How can we make tagging so convenient that we have good metadata for presenting and filtering results using facets? Many search solutions have automated tagging functionality to take load off users.
  • How can we use search as an integration platform to pull in content from other sources instead of making costly one-time integrations?
  • How will the new information repository fit into an existing search solution, for example are we changing the metadata model and how should the documents be ranked compared to other sources?
  • Should we migrate content from an old system to the new one or just freeze information creation in the old one and have a search box that let’s the user find information from both?
  • Can we use search to avoid creating duplicate information by encouraging users to make searches before typing new content or even doing implicit searches while the user is typing?

So does a piece of content that no one ever reads exist? Well in terms of bits on a disk in a data center, yes, but in terms of business value definitely no. Designing your information repository for Findability will have great returns in improved efficiency and user satisfaction.

Maria Johansson

Bridging the gap between people and technology

December 6 - 2010 | Maria Johansson

Tony Russell-Rose recently wrote about the changing face of search, a post that summed up the discussion about the future of 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 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:

  1. Help users become better searchers
  2. 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.

Ludvig Johansson

Search is a journey not a destination

December 2 - 2010 | Ludvig Johansson

Two weeks ago me, Ludvig Johansson and Christopher Wallström attended KMWorlds quadruple conference in Washington D.C. The conference consisted of four different conferences; KMWorld, Enterprise Search Summit, Taxonomy Bootcamp and SharePoint Symposium. I focused on Enterprise Search Summit and SharePoint Symposium and Christopher mainly covered Taxonomy Bootcamp as well as the Enterprise Search Summit. (Christopher will soon write a blog post about this as well.)

During the conferences there where some good quality content, however most of it was old news with speakers mainly focusing on outputs of their own products. This was disappointing since I had hoped to see the newest and coolest solutions within my area. Speakers presented systems from their corporations, where the newest and coolest functionality they described was shallow filters on a Google Search Appliance. From my perspective this is not new or cool. I would rather consider this standard functionality in today’s search solutions.

However, some sessions where really good. Daniel W. Rasmus talked about the Evolution of Search in quite a fun and thoughtful way. One thing he wanted to see in the near future was more personalization of search. Search needs to know the user and adapt to him/her and not simply use a standardized algorithm. As Rasmus sad it: “my search engine is not that in to me”. This is, as I would put it, spot on how we see it at Findwise. Today’s customer wants standard search with components that have existed for years now. It’s time for search to take the next step in the evolution and for us to start deliver Findabillity solutions adapted to your needs as an individual. In the line of this, Rasmus ended with another good quote: “Don’t let your search vendors set your exceptions to low”. I think this speaks for it self more or less. If we want contextual search then we should push the vendors out there to start deliver!

Another good session was delivered by Ellen Feaheny on how to utilize both old and new systems smarter. It was from this session the title of this post origins, “It’s a journey not a destination”. I thought this sums up what we feel everyday in our projects. It’s common that customers want to see projects to have a clear start and end. However with search and Findability we see it as a journey. I can even go as far to say it’s a journey without an end. We have customers coming and complaining about their search; saying “It doesn’t work anymore” or “The content is old”, to give two examples. The problem is that search is not a one time problem that you solve and then never have to think about again. If you don’t work with your search solution and treat search as a journey, continually improve relevance, content and invest time in search analytics your solution will soon get dusty and not deliver what your employees or customers wants.

Search is a journey not a destination.

Tobias Berg

LDAP connector for Openpipeline

November 23 - 2010 | Tobias Berg
Finding people within your organisation, also denoted as People Search, is something that is a key ingredient in a findability solutions. People catalogs are often based on an LDAP structure which holds the important information about each employee.

The LDAP connector for Openpipeline is the result of the latest activity at the Findwise development department which makes it easy to make the LDAP structure searchable. As always with a connector, you get direct access to the source which ensures a very efficent indexing and good control over the indexed information.

The LDAP connector has a number of features, some noted below:

  • SSL support – Supports LDAP over SSL
  • Pagination – LDAP entries can be retrieved in batches if the LDAP server supports the PagedResultControl. This increases performance and reduces memory consumption drastically
  • Incremental indexing – If the LDAP server flag each update to an entry with a timestamp, the connector can use this timestamp to only fetch updated entries.
  • Delete entries – LDAP entries that has been removed since the last run will be removed from the index
  • Attribute specification – Specify what attributes that should be returned for each entry. By only retrieving the attributes you need, performance is increased.

Interested of knowing more about the connector, or do you have any experience you like to share when indexing LDAP directories? Please drop a comment!

Maria Johansson

Metadata in focus for our Findability solution

October 28 - 2010 | Maria Johansson

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.

Katriina Bystrom

Better search engines and other stuff about information practices in workplaces

October 20 - 2010 | Katriina Bystrom

During this year I have worked on a research project that aims to facilitate the development and implementation of an enterprise search engine. By understanding the use and value of information at the workplace, we hope to create even better preconditions for optimizing a search engine to the requirements of a specific organization.

We use a work-task based research approach where we study information practices – that is, the normalized ways we use to recognize information needs, look for information, and how it is valued and used. By studying such practices in real-life work tasks, we can outline the role that a search engine plays in relation to other work tasks as well as to other ways of finding information. In short, being engaged in a creativity-oriented work task initiates different types of information practices compared to the practices we use in everyday, routine-based work tasks …

The creativity-oriented work tasks involve a dimension of innovation, and concepts such as learning and development are often used to describe these activities. Uncertainty is something that is associated with curiosity and may be seen as a driving force behind information seeking. Information that is rich in nuances and that offers different, even contradictory explanations or descriptions is usually appreciated, and the task outcome is only vaguely discerned at first. Routine-oriented tasks, on the other hand, are focused on increasing effectiveness and reducing uncertainty as quickly as possible in the task outcome, which itself may be sketched out relatively clearly from the beginning. Information seeking is often directed to readily available facts. All this means that a search engine must support a variety of information practices at any given workplace!

The “we” in this project is myself together with a Findwise colleague Henrik Strindberg. The project is financially supported by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, and while I am not working with the present project I am employed by the University of Borås.

Just now I am finalizing a presentation of the project for the ICKM conference in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, next week. The presentation is entitled “Interrelated use and value of information sources”, and will be available through the conference proceedings in due time.

Very exciting … and while there I will also attend the board meetings of the ASIS&T’s Board of Directors as a newly appointed Director-at-Large. Very exciting, too!

The 73rd Annual Meeting of ASIS&T focuses on “Navigation Streams in an Information Ecosystem”.

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