developing a search & findability practice for the enterprise

Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College

Developing a Search & Findability

Practice for the Enterprise

Ravi Mynampaty

Findability Program Manager

About me

A hustler making a living by pretending to

know more about search than he actually

does...

@ravimynampaty

http://www.usmansheikh.com/

Why the heck should I listen to Ravi?

One search (input) box to rule them all.

What I've been chasing...

What's this talk about?

Where did we come from?

Where are we going?

Religion

http://www.hfa.ucsb.edu/staff/wilcox/?page_id=950

10 Principles

5 Tools

What the heck is

Findability?

Search Patterns, Morville & Callender

Modified from Search Patterns, Morville & Callender

• Much of HBS web content not searchable

• Inconsistent location of search input box

• Plethora of search tools

• Many search dead ends

• Out of the box search engine

Circa 2005

2006

2006

Started with improvements to UI layer on Websites

2007

2007

• Started incorporating Intranet and protected

content

• Used three integration approaches:

o Blended Search

o Brokered Query

o Query Resubmit

2007

2008

2008

2008

• Have search engine do the heavy lifting

o Metadata injection in indexing pipeline

o Lightweight external metadata store

• Continuation of tactical, iterative approach

• Extend refiner option to 2nd-level of refiners

2008

2009

2009

Formalized 4 practice areas.

2010

2010

Developed Findability Standards

2010

Information

Management

Services (IMS)

2011/12

2011/2012

Rolled out standards

2011/2012

Rolled out standards

What have we learned?

Religion

http://www.hfa.ucsb.edu/staff/wilcox/?page_id=950

Fundamentalist

Incrementalism

Principles

Principle No. 0

Your search engine doesn't matter

(so much)

It's more about data and linkages between data

Principle No. 1

Top requirement for a search technology:

CONFIGURABILITY

Principle No. 2

关系

guanxi

Principle No. 3

根回し

nemawashi

Principle No. 4

Reach out to people who agree with you

Principle No. 5

Things users complain about will change

Principle No. 6

Be sure to grease the squeaky wheel

Principle No. 7

Do not fall into the "What if..." death spiral

Principle No. 8

Sometimes the stars will align just right

Principle No. 9

Search is sexy

5 Tools

zzpza: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzpza/3269784239/

Tool No. 1:

Data Dictionary

(courtesy of Erin Wise)

• Identify content types (People,

Publications, Events, etc.)

• Identify data to be captured for each

content type based on:

o Content structure

o Functional requirements

o Display standards

• Identify data that should be

controlled, and provide controlled

vocabularies

Tool No. 1: Data Dictionary Capture data consistently to facilitate display, filtering, search.

Tool No. 1: Data Dictionary

Tool No. 2: Biz Owner Questionnaire

1. What is the overall business purpose

/objective of this UI?

2. What do you know of the current specific

behaviors of users of this UI?

3. What do you know of the desired specific

behaviors of users of this UI?

Tool No. 3: Findability Audit Template

1. Ensure XYZ content is searchable from the XYZ site

Place a search input box on all WES pages. This search box should ...

Current Status: Content already being indexed by the HBS search engine, but…

Process: HTML in the page header will need to be edited manually to add search box

Priority: High

Recommended Timeframe: Short-term

Estimated Effort: 3-5 days to implement

Dependencies: Enabling fielded search requires data enhancement

Tool No. 4: Baseline Analytics Reports • Reports to Track and Evaluate Search Keywords and

Quality of Search

o Search Keywords report

o Queries with No Results, No clicks

• Report to Understand from Where Visitors Are Coming

o Referrer report

o Referring Pages report

• Report to Determine from Where Visitors Begin a

Search: Pages on which Local Search Invoked report

• Reports to Determine Where Visitors Go from a Search

Results Page. Report for Click-through from SERP.

o Report for Query-Query Reformulation. The series of

keyword phrases that a user employs during a single

search session.

Tool No. 5: Clustering search logs

2013

http://opensourcedelivers.com/

2013

(Photo courtesy Paulina Wójciak)

2014

• Operationalize search analytics program

• Automated loop of analytics feeding

taxonomy and metadata improvements

• Implement Information Management

Infrastructure

• Integrate taxonomy/tagging w/search

• Role-based relevancy at the group level

• APIs

2015

• Formal user testing for search

• Role-based relevancy at the individual level

• Continue federation of available APIs

• Rationalize Search UIs

...and plenty more to come...

Remember...

Become a Fundamentalist Incrementalist

Thank you!

searchguy@hbs.edu

@ravimynampaty

http://www.slideshare.net/mynampaty/