Here is the third in a series of my notes on the 2010 Enterprise Search Summit. I attended a three-part session. Leveraging Your Most Important Asset: Knowledge by Stacy Monarko, Sharpening Enterprise Search Performance, by Keith DeWeese, Taxonomy and Automated Indexing Project Manager, Chicago Tribune and Search Behavior Analysis by Harald Kirsh, Raytion. Here are the session overviews. My notes follow.
Leveraging Your Most Important Asset: Knowledge – ” We’ve heard it said, “An organization’s most valuable asset is its people.” Customer-driven firms will answer, “Customers.” Research-heavy organizations may answer, “IP.” The common element is “knowledge,” which comes from many places including customer interactions, employees, consultants, and reports. Learn what issues prevent most companies from exposing and utilizing information’s true value. Several case studies will highlight how significant, measurable value was gained with access to knowledge across global siloed information repositories.
Sharpening Enterprise Search Performance - “Current information volumes demand automated surfacing of relevant content and when such content is dynamic, intelligence must be embedded in the operations. Hear how the Chicago Tribune has successfully met this challenge: improving search engine effectiveness by automating key-wording and meta-tagging information, from web channels that cross 20 major US markets.”
Search Behavior Analysis – “While classical site analytics explores how visitors navigate to and within a website, search behavior analysis focuses on insights into what users are looking for in the first place. In addition to giving valuable hints on how to make search itself more effective, it can reveal gaps in the content and point to usability issues. This session will tell you how to implement search analytics in practice and how to integrate it with existing search engines.”
Stacy Monarko from Vivisimo discussed leveraging your most important asset: knowledge. It is more than search but information optimization. I would agree. Search is the means, a Bob Boeri said in the last session, you want to find stuff, not search. To focus on just search is like Polaroid not wanting do digital photos as it would cut into their film’s business.
Instead looking at a search problem, Stacy said to look at a business problem like reducing the amount of redundant work by researchers. This is an information optimization question. Another business problem: How can I reduce training costs? How can I get people productive quicker? How can employees understand how to educate themselves. One information optimization project reduced training costs by 40% through addressing this question.
She discussed the need to sit in the user’s shoes. I found this to be the most fun part of knowledge related projects. Riding with English plumbers in the field was one great example for me.
Next Keith DeWeese from the Tribune Company discussed ontology and search at his firm. I was especially interested in what newspapers are doing now that they are under siege (see Who Killed the Rocky Mountain News? from John Temple) and there is also hope (see Creating a Sustainable Ecosystem for Community News Media). Keith said his company has been operating under bankruptcy for the past few years. They have been using SAS tools since 2007. Content in news organizations is constantly changing.
They also have the challenge of helping others finding their content through search optimization. I was at a session by the Huffington Post where they are constantly running experiments in this area and rearranging headlines on an every 15 minute basis. That is hard for a traditional news organization to compete with. Keith mentioned the need to shift a headline from a “plane crash” to a “heroic landing” as the story evolves. There is also the issue of matching appropriate ads to content. They do not want dog food ads connected a story about a politician’s pet projects. They also offer guided search that provides customized classification for filtering the news to better match the user’s needs.
Next Harald Kirsh from Raytion in Germany started to discuss search behavior analysis without benefit of his slides. I felt for him as this happen to me last Fall in Montreal when there was also a screen resolution issue. I just ad libbed without the slides but he persisted and with help go the slides working.
Search logs help you see what people are looking for, not simply what they find. They selected some metrics to help with their search behavior analysis such as queries over time, most frequent queries, zero result queries, and most clicked results pages. Harald said it is hard to define what is a successful search as you do not know what the user is trying to do simply from looking at actions. I would agree.