Next week, I will be speaking at Taxonomy Boot Camp 2010 – on the topic of Enterprise Taxonomy: A Vision. Much of what I will have to share is from a post I wrote here some time ago.
Hopefully I have enough new issue to make it a good session for everyone!
My first post back after too-long a period of time off. I wanted to jump back in and share some concrete thoughts on best bet governance.
I’ve previously written about best bets and how I thought, while not perfect, they were an important part of a search solution. In that post, I also described the process we had adopted for managing best bets, which was a relatively indirect means supported by the search engine we used for the search solution.
Since moving employers, I now have responsibility for a local search solution as well as input on an enterprise search solution where neither of the search engines supports a similar model. Instead, both support the (more typical?) model where you identify particular search terms that you feel need to have a best bet and you then need to identify a specific target (perhaps multiple targets) for those search terms.
This model offers some advantages such as specificity in the results and the ability to actively determine what search terms have a best bet that will show.
This model also offers some disadvantages, the primary one (in my mind) being that they must be managed – you must have a means to identify which terms should have best bets and which targets those terms should show as a best bet. This implies some kind of manual management, which, in resource-constrained environments, can be a challenge. As noted in my previous article, others have provided insight about how they have implemented and how they manage best bets.
Now having responsibility for a search solution requiring manual management of best bets, we’ve faced the same questions of governance and management and I thought I would share the governance model we’ve adopted. I did review many of the previous writings on this to help shape these, so thanks to those who have written before on the topic!
Our governance model is largely based on trying to provide a framework for consistency and usability of our best bets. We need some way to ensure we do not spend inordinate time on managing requests while also ensuring that we can identify new, valuable search terms and targets for best bets.
Without further ado, here is an overview of the governance we are using:
The one interesting experience we’ve had so far with this governance model is that we get a lot of push back from site publishers who want to provide a lengthy laundry list of terms for their site, even when 75% of that list is never used (or at least in a twelve month period we’ll sometimes check). They seem convinced that there is value in setting up best bets for terms even when you can show that there is none. We are currently making changes in the way we manage best bets and also in how we can use these desirable terms to enhance the organic results directly. More on that later.
There you have our current governance model. Not too fancy or complicated and still not ideal, but it’s working for us and we recognize that it’s a work in progress.
Now that I have the “monkey off my back” in terms of getting a new post published, I plan to re-start regular writing. Check back soon for more on search, content management and taxonomy!
It’s now been slightly over a year since my last post. Yikes, time flies!
Where have I been? Well, mostly, I’ve been getting myself comfortable in a new position. Tomorrow marks my first anniversary as an employee of Deloitte. I took on the role of Portal Program Lead for the Global Consulting Knowledge Management (GCKM) group. This position carries a lot of the same responsibilities I had with Novell – I manage a small team of great people taking care of a portal and its associated search solution, its taxonomy and also interacting with and supporting a lot of people within the GCKM group and in the practice at large.
One big difference is that it’s not the “enterprise” portal and search solution I used to manage – instead, it’s the knowledge management portal specifically for Deloitte’s consulting organization. Another big difference is that it’s a portal targeted at an audience that is many times larger than Novell’s employee population. So a relatively small scope but a relatively much larger audience. Definitely a much difference organization then the one I had been used to!
It’s been an interesting year – learning a lot and getting used to a new organization, new technical solutions, new business problems, and more.
This is probably as much rationalization as anything but I’ve been feeling like I wanted to wait until I had been at this new position long enough to begin writing again. As in the past, I will mostly write about my own perceptions and learnings and thinking based on my experiences. Given that I did not feel comfortable writing about what I had learned at Novell after I left, while at the same time, I did not feel like I had enough grounding at Deloitte to write about that experience, I have been in a holding pattern.
With tomorrow being my one year anniversary, I figure it’s time to jump back in. As always, opinions expressed here are mine and do not imply any belief on the part of my employer.
My first post back will be on Best Bet Governance. Look for it shortly!
In my last post, I wrote about a particular process for capturing “knowledge nuggets” from a community’s on-going discussions and toward the end of that write up, I described some ideas for the motivation for members to be involved in this knowledge capture process and how it might translate to an enterprise. All of the ideas I wrote about were pretty general and as I considered it, it occurred to me that another topic is – what are the kinds of specific objectives an employee could be given that would (hopefully) increase knowledge sharing in an enterprise? What can a manager (or, more generally, a company) do to give employees an incentive to share knowledge?
Instead of approaching this from the perspective of what motivates participants, I am going to write about some concrete ideas that can be used to measure how much knowledge sharing is going on in your organization. Ultimately, a company needs to build into its culture and values an expectation of knowledge sharing and management in order to have a long-lasting impact. I would think of the more tactical and concrete ideas here as a way to bootstrap an organization into the mindset of knowledge sharing.
A few caveats: First – Given that these are concrete and measurable, they can be “gamed” like anything else that can be measured. I’ve always thought measures like this need to be part of an overall discussion between a manager and an employee about what the employee is doing to share knowledge and not (necessarily) used as absolute truth.
Second – A knowledge sharing culture is much more than numbers – it’s a set of expectations that employees hold of themselves and others; it’s a set of norms that people follow. That being said, I do believe that it is possible to use some aspects of concrete numbers to understand impacts of knowledge management initiatives and to understand how much the expectations and norms are “taking hold” in the culture of your organization. Said another way – measurement is not the goal but if you can not measure something, how do you know its value?
Third – I, again, need to reference the excellent guide, “How to use KPIs in Knowledge Management” by Patrick Lambe. He provides a very exhaustive list of things to measure, but his guide is primarily written as ways to measure the KM program. Here I am trying to personalize it down to an individual employee and setting that employee’s objectives related to knowledge sharing.
In the rest of this post, I’ll make the assumption that your organization has a performance management program and that that program includes the definition for employees of objectives they need to complete during a specific time period. The ideas below are applicable in that context.
Not all of these will apply to all employees and some employees may not have any specific, measurable knowledge sharing objectives (though that seems hard to imagine regardless of the job). An organization should look at what they want to accomplish, what their tool set will support (or what they’re willing to enhance to get their tool set to support what they want) and then be specific with each employee. This is meant only as a set of ideas or suggestions to consider in making knowledge sharing an explicit, concrete and measurable activity for your employees.
Given some concrete objectives to measure employees with, it seems relatively simply to roll those objectives up to management to measure (and set expectations for up front) knowledge sharing by a team of employees, not just individual employees. On the other hand, a forward-thinking organization will define group-level objectives which can be cascaded down to individual employees.
Given either of these approaches, a manager (or director, VP, etc.) may then have both an organizational level objective and their own individual objectives related to knowledge sharing.
Lastly – while I’ve never explored this, several years ago, a vice president at my company asked for a single index of knowledge sharing. I would make the analogy of some like a stock index – a mathematical combination of measuring different aspects of knowledge sharing within the company. A single number that somehow denotes how much knowledge sharing is going on.
I don’t seriously think this could be meaningful but it’s an interesting idea to explore. Here are some definitions I’ll use to do so:
Given the above, you could imagine the “knowledge sharing index” at any moment in time could be computed as (for – I don’t know how to make this look like a “real” formula!):
Knowledge index at time t = Sum (i=1…N) of Wi * ( Mt,i / Bi )
A specific example:
- Let’s say you have three sources of “knowledge sharing” – a corporate wiki, a mailing list server and a corporate knowledge base
- For the wiki, you’ll measure total edits every week, for the list server, you’ll measure total posts to all mailing lists on it and for the knowledge base, you’ll measure contributions and downloads (as two measures).
- In terms of weights, you want to give the mailing lists the least weight, the wiki an intermediate weight and the combined knowledge base the most weight. Let’s say the weights are 15 for the mailing lists, 25 for the wiki, 25 for the downloads from the knowledge base and 35 for contributions to the knowledge base. (So the weights total to 100!)
- Your baseline for future measurement is 200 edits in the wiki, 150 posts to the list server, 25 contributions to the knowledge base and downloads of 2,000 from the knowledge base
- At some week after the start, you take a measurement and find 180 wiki edits, 160 posts to the list server, 22 knowledge base contributions and 2200 downloads from the knowledge base.
- The knowledge sharing index for that week would be 95.8. This is “down” even though most measures are up (which simply reflects the relative importance of one factor, which is down).
If I were to actually try something like this, I would pick the values of Wi so that the baseline measurement (when t= 0) comes to a nice round value – 100 or something. You can then imagine reporting something like, “Well, knowledge sharing for this month is at 110!” Or, “Knowledge sharing for this month has fallen from 108 to 92”. If nothing else, I find it amusing to think so concretely in terms of “how much” knowledge sharing is going on in an organization.
There are some obvious complexities in this idea that I don’t have good answers for:
In any event – I think this is an interesting, if academic, discussion and would be interested in others’ thoughts on either individual performance management or the idea of a knowledge sharing index.
Recently, there was a thread of discussion on the com-Prac list about the “death of a community” and a follow-up discussion about what or how CoPs should capture discussion-produced knowledge.
I found these to be very interesting and thought-provoking discussions. In this post, I will write about two aspects of these discussions – the retiring of a community and also a case study in how a community centered around a mailing list meets the challenge of knowledge capture.
Before getting into the details – I wanted to (re-)state that I recognize that a community is (much) more than a mailing list – community members interact in many ways, some online, some in “real space”. That being said, I also know that for many communities the tool of choice for group communication is a mailing list, so in this post, I will write about issues related to the use of mailing lists, though the ideas can be transferred to other means of electronic exchange. As John D. Smith notes in the second thread:
“All of the discussion about summarization so far assumes that a community almost exclusively lives on one platform. As Nancy alluded to, I think the reality is quite a bit more messy. Note the private emails between Eric and Miguel that were mentioned in this thread. We ourselves interact in LOTS of different locations.”
In other words, even if you could solve the knowledge capture challenge for one mode of discussion (mailing lists) you are still likely missing out on a lot of the learning and knowledge sharing going on in the community. Keep that in mind!
As I’ve written about before, within the context of my current employer’s community program, mailing lists, and their related archives are an important part of our community of practice initiative (and, by extension our KM program). We have not developed a formal means to retire (or “execute” in the terms used in the first thread mentioned above) a community, but we do have a formal process for retiring mailing lists. While the following is about mailing lists, I think the concepts can scale up to any community – though it might require aggregating similar insights about other channels used by the community.
Within our infrastructure, many of the existing mailing lists are associated with one (or more) communities and we provide a simple means for anyone to request a new mailing list. There is a very light review process, primarily focused on ensuring that the requested list is different enough from existing lists and also doesn’t have such a small topic space that it will likely be very under-utilized), which means that over time we can end up with a lot of mailing lists. Without some regular house-cleaning, this situation can have a very negative impact on how a user’s discovery process – hundreds and hundreds of mailing lists means a lot of confusion.
One way we grapple with this is to use the communities as a categorization of mailing lists. Instead of leaving a user with hundreds of mailing lists to wade through, we encourage them to look for a community in which they’re interested and, through that community, find associated mailing lists. This normally reduces the number of mailing lists to consider down to a small handful.
However, we still have needed a house-cleaning process, so several years ago, this is what we set up:
In our environment, doing this once a year typically reduces the count of lists by about 10% – though the count of lists has remained remarkably stable over time, which would say that we then have that same kind of growth over the next year. On the other hand, if we did not proactively review and retire lists like this, we would be seeing an ever-growing list of mailing lists, making it harder for everyone to find the lists that are engendering valuable discussions.
Or… How to lift knowledge out of the on-going discussion of a community into a better form of reusability.
If a community uses a tool like a mailing list to engender discussion and knowledge sharing – how does a community capture “nuggets” of knowledge from the discussion into a more easily digestible form? Does the community need to (perhaps not given a sophisticated enough means to find information in the archives)?
I have no magic solution to this problem but I did find another comment to be very illustrative of one aspect of the original discussion – who “owns” the archives of a community’s discussion and what is the value of those archives? Even in their raw form, why do those archives have value? As Nancy White notes:
“I suspect that only a small percentage of the members (over time) would actually use the archives. But because they hold the words of members, there may be both individual and collective sense of ownership that have little to do with “utility.””
The rest of this post will be a brief description of a knowledge capture process I’m very familiar with – though I’m not sure if it will transfer well into other domains. For this description, I’m going completely outside of the enterprise and to a community of which I’m a member that revolves around a table-top fantasy war game named Warhammer.
A bit of background: Warhammer is a rather complex game, with a rulebook that weighs in at several hundred pages and about a dozen additional books that provides details on the various types of armies players can use. All told, probably something like 1,000 pages describing the rules and background of the game. Given the complexity of the game, it is very common that during any given game, the players will run into situations not covered well by the rules – these are usually areas involving interactions of special rules for the armies playing. In the many online forums / mailing lists that exist, one of the most frequent types of discussions revolves around these situations and how to interpret the rules. Many of the same questions come up repeatedly – obvious fodder for an FAQ.
(As an aside, given that Warhammer is published and sold by a company – Games Workshop – one could that they should publish all of the relevant FAQs. They do publish FAQs and errata but they do so at a sporadic pace at best and do not address many of the frequently asked questions.)
One particular Warhammer-related community of which I’m a member – the Direwolf (DW) community – has established a pretty well defined means to gather these FAQs and publish them back to the Warhammer community at large. A brief overview of the process:
Netting it out: A community-selected subset of the community monitors the community for questions in their area of expertise, vettes an answer with the rest of the FAQ council, and then the FAQ documentation is updated as appropriate.
This is pretty straightforward, but the value of this effort is reflected in the fact that the game publisher now very commonly uses input from the Direwolf FAQ council in considering their own responses to FAQs and also in the fact that many players from around the world use the Direwolf FAQ to ensure a consistent interpretation of those “fuzzy” areas of the game. A true value add for the Warhammer community at large.
That being said, this process does take quite a bit of energy and commitment, especially on the part of the “keeper” of the documentation, to keep things up to date. In this case, I believe that the value-add for members of the council is knowing that they are contributing to the Warhammer community at large and also knowing that they are helping themselves in their own engagement of playing the game.
Last summer, I read the article by Kas Thomas from CMS Watch titled “Best Bets – a Worst Practice” with some interest. I found his thesis to be provocative and posted a note to the SearchCoP community asking for other’s insights on the use of Best Bets. I received a number of responses taking some issue with Kas’ concept of what best bets is and some also some responses describing different means to manage best bets (hopefully without requiring the “serious amounts of human intervention” described by Kas.
In this post, I’ll provide a summary of sorts and also describe some of the ways described for managing best bets and also the way we have managed best bets.
Kas’ thesis is that best bets are not a good practice because they are largely a hack layered on top of a search engine and require significant manual intervention. Further, if your search engine isn’t already providing access to appropriate “best bets” for queries, you should get yourself a new search engine.
Some of the most interesting comments from the thread of discussion on the SearchCoP include (I’ll try to provide as cohesive picture of sentiment as I can but will only provide parts of the discussion – if I have portrayed intent incorrectly – that’s my fault and not the original author):
From Tim W:
“Search analytics are not used to determine BB … BB are links commonly used, enterprise resources that the search engine may not always rank highly because for a number of reasons. For example, lack of metadata, lack of links to the resource and content that does not reflect how people might look for the document. Perhaps it is an application and not a document at all.”
From Walter U:
“…manual Best Bets are expensive and error-prone. I consider them a last resort.”
From Jon T:
“Best Bets are not just about pushing certain results to the top. It is also about providing confidence in the results to users.
If you separate out Best Bets from the automatic results, it will show a user that these have been manually singled out as great content – a sign that some quality review has been applied.”
From Avi R:
“Best Bets can be hard to manage, because they require resources.
If no one keeps checking on them, they become stale, full of old content and bad links.
…
Best Bets are also incredibly useful.
They’re good for linking to content that can’t be indexed, and may even be on another site entirely. They’re good for dealing with … all the sorts of things that are obvious to humans but don’t fit the search paradigm.”
So, lots of differing opinions on best bets and their utility, I guess.
A few more pieces of background for you to consider: Walter U has posted on his blog (Most Casual Observer) a great piece titled “Good to Great Search” that discusses best bets (among other things); and, Dennis Deacon posted an article titled, “Enterprise Search Engine Best Bets – Pros & Cons” (which was also referenced in Kas Thomas’ post). Good reading on both – go take a look at them!
My own opinion – I believe that best bets are an important piece of search and agree with Jon T’s comment above that their presence (and, hopefully, quality!) give users some confidence that there is some human intelligence going into the presentation of the search results as a whole. I also have to agree with Kas’s argument that search engines should be able to consistently place the “right” item at the top of results, but I do not believe any search engine is really able to today – there are still many issues to deal with (see details in my posts on coverage, identity, and relevance for my own insights on some of the major issues).
That being said, I also agree that you need to manage best bets in a way that does not cost your organization more than their value – or to manage them in a way that the value is realized in multiple ways.
Contrary to what Tim W says, and as I have written about in my posts on search analytics (especially in the use of search results usage), I do believe you can use search analytics to inform your best bets but they do not provide a complete solution by any means.
From here on out, I’ll describe some of the ways best bets can be managed – the first few will be summary of what people shared on the SearchCoP community and then I’ll provide some more detail on how we have managed them. The emphasis (bolding) is my own to highlight some of what I think are important points of differentiation.
From Tim W:
“We have a company Intranet index; kind of a phone book for web sites (A B C D…Z). It’s been around for a long time. If you want your web site listed in the company index, it must be registered in our “Content Tracker” application. Basically, the Content Tracker allows content owners to register their web site name, URL, add a description, metadata and an expiration date. This simple database table drives the Intranet index. The content owner must update their record once per year or it expires out of the index.
This database was never intended for Enterprise Search but it has proven to be a great source for Best Bets. We point our ODBC Database Fetch (Autonomy crawler) at the SQL database for the Content Tracker and we got instant, user-driven, high quality Best Bets.
Instead of managing 150+ Best Bets myself, we now have around 800 user-managed Best Bets. They expire out of the search engine if the content owner doesn’t update their record once per year. It has proven very effective for web content. In effect, we’ve turned over management of Best Bets to the collective wisdom of the employees.”
From Jim S:
“We have added an enterprise/business group best bet key word/phrase meta data.
All documents that are best bet are hosted through our WCM and have a keyword meta tag added to indicate they are a best bet. This list is limited and managed through a steering team and search administrator. We primarily only do best bets for popular searches. Employee can suggest a best bet – both the term and the associated link(s). It is collaborative/wiki like but still moderated and in the end approved or rejected by a team. There is probably less than 1 best bet suggestion a month.
If a document is removed or deleted the meta data tag also is removed and the best bet disappears automatically.
Our WCM also has a required review date for all content. The date is adjustable so that content will be deactivated at a specific date if the date is not extended. This is great for posting information that has a short life as well as requiring content owners to interact with the content at least every 30 Months (maximum) to verify that the content is still relevant to the audience. The Content is not removed from the system, rather it’s deactivated (unpublished) so it no longer accessible and the dynamic links and search index automatically remove the invalid references. The content owner can reactivate it by setting the review date into the future.
If an external link (not one in our WCM) is classified as a best bet then a WCM redirect page is created that stores the best bet meta tag. Of course it has a review/expiration so the link doesn’t go on forever and our link testing can flag if the link is no longer responding. If the document is in the DMS it would rarely be deleted. In normal cases it would be archived and a archive note would be placed to indicate the change. Thus no broken links.
Good content engineering on the front end will help automate the maintenance on the back end to keep the quality in search high.“
The first process is external to the content and doesn’t require modifying the content (assuming I’m understanding Tim’s description correctly). There are obvious pros and cons to this approach.
By contrast, the second process embeds the “best bet” attribution in the content (perhaps more accurately in the content management system around the content) and also embeds the content in a larger management process – again, some obvious pros and cons to the approach.
Now for a description of our process -The process and tools in place in our solution are similar to the description provided by Tim W. I spoke about this topic at the Enterprise Search Summit West in November 2007, so you might be able to find the presentation for it there (though I could not just now in a few minutes of searching).
With the search engine we use, the results displayed in best bets are actually just a secondary search performed when a user performs any search – the engine searches the standard corpus (whatever context the user has chosen, which would normally default to “everything”) and separately searches a specific index that include all content that is a potential best bet.
The top 5 (a number that’s configurable) results that match the user’s search from the best bets index are displayed above the regular results and are designated “best bets”.
How do items get into the best bets index, then? Similar to what Tim W describes, on our intranet, we have an “A-Z index” – in our case, it’s a web page that provides a list of all of the resources that have been identified as “important” at some point in the past by a user. (The A-Z index does provide category pages that provide subsets of links, but the main A-Z index includes all items so the sub-pages are not really relevant here.)
So the simple answer to, “How do items get into the best bets index?” is, “They are added to the A-Z index!” The longer answer is that users (any user) can request an item be added to the A-Z index and there is then a simple review process to get it into the A-Z index. We have defined some specific criteria for entries added to the A-Z, several of which are related to ensuring quality search results for the new item, so when a request is submitted, it is reviewed against these criteria and only added if it meets all of the criteria. Typically, findability is not something considered by the submitter, so there will be a cycle with the submitter to improve the findability of the item being added (normally, this would include improving the title of the item, adding keywords and a good description).
Once an item is added to the A-Z index, it is a potential best bet. The search engine indexes the items in the A-Z through a web crawler that is configured to start with the A-Z index page and goes just one link away from that (i.e., it only indexes items directly linked to from the A-Z index).
In this process, there is no way to directly map specific searches (keywords) to specific results showing up in best bets. The best bets will show up in the results for a given search based on normally calculated relevance for the search. However, the best bet population numbers only about 800 items instead of the roughly half million items that might show up in the regular results – as long as the targets in the A-Z index have good titles and are tagged with the proper keywords and description, they will normally show up in best bets results for those words.
Some advantages of this approach:
Some disadvantages of this approach
Having written about what I consider to be the principles of enterprise search, about people search in the enterprise, about search analytics and several other topics related to search in some detail, I thought I would share some insights on a role I have called search analyst – the person(s) who are responsible for the care and feeding of an enterprise search solution. The purpose of this post is to share some thoughts and experiences and help others who might be facing a problem similar to what my team faced several years back – we had a search solution in place that no one was maintaining and we needed to figure out what to do to improve it.
Regarding the name of the role – when this role first came into being in my company, I did not know what to call the role, exactly, but we started using the term search analyst because it related to the domain (search) and reflected the fact that the role was detailed (analytical) but was not a technical job like a developer. Subsequently, I’ve heard the term used by others so it seems to be fairly common terminology now – it’s possible that by now I’ve muddled the timeline enough in my head that I had heard the term prior to using it but just don’t recall that!
What does a search analyst do for you? The short answer is that a search analyst is the point person for improving the quality of results in your search solution. The longer answer is that a search analyst needs to:
In order to define success for a search analyst, you need to set some specific objectives for the search analyst(s). Ultimately, given the job description, they translate to measuring how the search analyst has been successful in improving search, but here are some specific suggestions about how you might measure that:
Another common question I’ve received is what percentage of time should a search analyst expect to spend on this type of work? Some organizations may have large enough search needs to warrant multiple full-time people on this task but we are not such an organization and I suspect many other organizations will be in the same situation. So you might have someone who splits their time among several roles and this is just one of them.
I don’t have a full answer to the question because, ultimately, it will depend on the value your organization does place on search. My experience has been that in an organization of approximately 5-6,000 users (employees) covering a total corpus of about a million items spread across several dozen sites / applications / repositories, spending about .25 FTE on search analyst tasks seems to provide for steady improvements and progress.
Spending less than that (down to about .1 FTE), I’ve found, results in a “steady state” – no real improvements but at least the solution does not seem to degrade. Obviously, spending more than that could result in better improvements but I find that dependence on others (content owners, application owners, etc.) can be a limiting factor in effectiveness – full organizational support for the efforts of the search analyst (giving the search analyst a voice in prioritization of work) can help alleviate that. (A search analyst with a software development background may find this less of an issue as, depending on your organization, you may find yourself less tied to development resources than you would otherwise be, though this also likely raises your own FTE commitment.)
The above description is worded as if your organization has a single person focused on search analyst responsibilities. It might also be useful to spread the responsibility among multiple people. One reason would be if your enterprise’s search solution is large enough to warrant a team of people instead of a single person. A second would be that it can be useful to have different search analysts focused (perhaps part time still for each of them) on different content areas. In this second situation, you will want to be careful about how “territorial” search analysts are, especially in the face of significant new content sources (you want to ensure that someone takes on whatever responsibility there might be for that content in regards to ensuring good findability).
So far I’ve provided a description of the role of a search analyst, suggestions for objectives you can assign to a search analyst and at least an idea of the time commitment you might expect to have an effective search analyst. But, if you were looking to staff such a position, what kinds of skills should you look for? Here are my thoughts:
If your search needs warrant more than one person focused on improving your enterprise search solution, as much overlap in the above as feasible is good, though you may have team members specializing in some skills while others focus on other areas.
Another important issue to address is where in your overall organization should the search analyst responsibility rest? I don’t have a good answer for this question and am interested in others’ opinions. My own experiences:
Enough about my own insights – What does anyone else have to share about how you perceive this role? Where does it fit in your organization? What are your objectives for this role?
In my previous two posts, I’ve written about some basic search analytics and then some more advanced analysis you can also apply. In this post, I’ll write about the types of analysis you can and should be doing on data captured about the usage of search results from your search solution. This is largely a topic that could be in the “advanced” analytics topic but for our search solution, it is not built into the search solution and has been implemented only in the last year through some custom work, so it feels different enough (to me) and also has enough details within it that I decided to break it out.
When I first started working on our search solution and dug into the reports and data we had available about search behavior, I found we had things like:
and much more. However, I was frustrated by this because it did not give me a very complete picture. We could see the searches people were using – at least the top searches – but we could not get any indication of “success” or what people found useful in search, even. The closest we got from the reports was the last item listed above, which in a typical report might look something like:
Search Results Pages
However, all this really reflects is the percentage of each page number visited by a searcher – so 95% of users never go beyond page 1 and the engine assumes that means they found what they wanted there. That’s a very bad assumption, obviously.
I wanted to be able to understand what people were actually clicking on (if anything) when they performed a search! I ended up solving this with a very simple solution (simple once I thought of it). I believe this emulates what Google (and probably many other search engines) do. I built a simple servlet that takes a number of parameters, including a URL (encoded) and the various pieces of data about a search result target and stores an event in a database from those parameters and then forwards the user to the desired URL. Then the search results page was updated to provide the URL for that servlet in the search results instead of the direct URL to the target. That’s been in place for a while now and the data is extremely useful!
By way of explanation, the following are the data elements being captured for each “click” on a search result:
This data provides for a lot of insight on behavior. You can guess what someone might be looking for based on understanding the searches they are performing but you can come a lot closer to understanding what they’re really looking for by understanding what they actually accessed. Of course, it’s important to remember that this does not really necessarily equate to the user finding what they are looking for, but may only indicate which result looks most attractive to them, so there is still some uncertainty in understand this.
While I ended up having to do some custom development to achieve this, some search engines will capture this type of data, so you might have access to all of this without any special effort on your part!
Also – I assume that it would be possible to capture a lot of this using a standard web analytics tool as well – I had several discussions with our web analytics vendor about this but had some resource constraints that kept it from getting implemented and also it seemed it would depend in part on the target of the click being instrumented in the right way (having JavaScript in it to capture the event). So any page that did not have that (say a web application whose template could not be modified) or any document (something like a PDF, etc) would likely not be captured correctly.
Given the type of data described above, here are some of the questions and actions you can take as a search analyst:
You can also combine data from this source with data from your web analytics solution to do some additional analysis. If you capture the search usage data in your web analytics tool (as I mention above should be possible), doing this type of analysis should be much easier, too!
Here’s a wrap (for now) on the types of actionable metrics you might consider for your search program. I’ve covered some basic metrics that just about any search engine should be able to support; then some more complex metrics (requiring combining data from other sources or some kind of processing on the data used for the basic metrics) and in this post, I’ve covered some data and analysis that provides a more comprehensive picture of the overall flow of a user through your search solution.
There are a lot more interesting questions I’ve come up with in the time I’ve had access to the data described above and also with the data that I discussed in my previous two posts, but many of them seem a bit academic and I have not been able to identify possible actions to take based on the insights from them.
Please share your thoughts or, if you would, point me to any other resources you might know of in this area!
In my last post, I provided a description of some basic metrics you might want to look into using for your search solution (assuming you’re not already). In this post, I’ll describe a few more metrics that may take a bit more effort to pull together (depending on your search engine).
First up – there is quite a lot of insight to be gained from combining your search analytics data with your web analytics data. It is even possible to capture almost all of your search analytics in your web analytics solution which makes this combination easier, though that can take work. For your external site, it’s also very likely that your web analytics solution will provide insight on the searches that lead people to your site.
A first useful piece of analysis you can perform is to review your top N searches, perform the same searches yourself and review the resulting top target’s usage as reported in your web analytics tool.
A second step would be to review your web analytics report for the most highly used content on your site. For the most highly utilized targets, determine what are the obvious searches that should expose those targets and then try those searches out and see where the highly used targets fall in the results.
Another fruitful area to explore is to consider what people actually use from search results after they’ve done a search (do they click on the first item, second? what is the most common target for a given keyword? Etc.). I’ll post about this separately.
I’m sure there are other areas that could be explored here – please share if you have some ideas.
When I first got involved in supporting a search solution, I spent some time understanding the reports I got from my search engine. We had our engine configured to provide reports on a weekly basis and the reports provided the top 100 searches for the week. All very interesting and as we started out, we tried to understand (given limited time to invest) how best to use the insight from just these 100 searches each week.
We quickly realized that there was no really good, sustainable answer and this was compounded by the fact that the engine reported two searches as different searches if there was *any* difference between two searches (even something as simple as case difference, even though the engine itself does not consider case when doing a search – go figure).
In order to see the forest for the trees, we decided what would be desirable is to categorize the searches – associate individual searches with a larger grouping that allows us to focus at a higher level. The question was how best to do this?
Soon after trying to work out how to do this, I attended Enterprise Search Summit West 2007 and attended a session titled “Taxonomize Your Search Logs” by Marilyn Chartrand from Kaiser Permanente. She spoke about exactly this topic, and, more specifically, the value of doing this as a way to understand search behavior better, to be able to talk to stakeholders in ways that make more sense to them, and more.
Marilyn’s approach was to have a database (she showed it to me and I think it was actually in a taxonomy tool but I don’t recall the details – sorry!) where she maintained a mapping from individual search terms to the taxonomy values.
After that, I’ve started working on the same type of structure and have made good headway. Further, I’ve also managed to have a way to capture every single search (not just the top N) into a SQL database so that it’s possible to view the “long tail” and categorize that as well. I still don’t have a good automated solution to anything like auto-categorizing the terms but the level of re-use from one reporting period to the next is high enough that dumping in a new period’s data requires categorization of only part of the new data. [Updated 26 Jan 2009 to add the following] Part of the challenge is that you will likely want to apply many of the same textual conversions to your database of captured searches that are applied by your search engine – synonyms, stemming, lemmatization, etc. These conversions can help simplify the categorization of the captured searches.
Anyway – the types of questions this enables you to answer and why it can be useful include:
Another useful type of analysis you can perform on search data is to look at simple metrics of the searches. Louis Rosenfeld identified several of these – I’m including those here and a few additional thoughts.
Chart of Searches per Word Count
Chart of Search Length to number of searches
Another interesting view of your search data is hinted at by the discussion above of “secondary” search words – words that are used in conjunction with other words. I have not yet managed to complete this view (lack of time and, frankly, the volume of data is a bit daunting with the tools I’ve tried).
The idea is to parse your searches into their constituent words and then build a network between the words, where the each word is a node and the links between the words represent the strength of the connection between the words – where “strength” is the number of times those two words appear in the same searches.
Having this available as a visual tool to explore words in search seems like it would be valuable as a way to understand their relationships and could give good insight on the overall information needs of your searchers.
The cost (in myown time if nothing else) of taking the data and manipulating it into a format that could then be exposed in this, however, has been high enough to keep me from doing it without some more concrete ideas for what actionable steps I could take from the insight gained. I’m just not confident enough to think that this would expose anything much more than “the most common words used tend to be used together most commonly”.
I’m missing a lot of interesting additional types of analyses above – feel free to share your thoughts and ideas.
In my next post, I’ll explore in some more detail the insights to be gained from analyzing what people are using in search results (not just what people are searching for).
In my first few posts (about a year ago now), I covered what I call the three principles of enterprise search – coverage, identity, and relevance. I have posted on enterprise search topics a few times in the meantime and wanted to return to the topic with some thoughts to share on search analytics and provide some ideas for actionable metrics related to search.
I’m planning 3 posts in this series – this first one will cover some of what I think of as the “basic” metrics, a second post on some more advanced ideas and a third post focusing more on metrics related to the usage of search results (instead of just the searching behavior itself).
Before getting into the details, I also wanted to say that I’ve found a lot of inspiration from the writings and speaking of Louis Rosenfeld and also Avi Rappoport and strongly recommend you look into their writings. A specific webinar to share with you, provided by Louis, is “Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience“, which Louis presented in a Search CoP webcast last spring. Good stuff!
Now onto some basic metrics I’ve found useful. Most of these are pretty obvious, but I guess it’s good to start at the start.
That’s all of the topics I have for “basic metrics”. Next up, some ideas (along with actions to take from them) on more complex search metrics. Hopefully, you find my recommendations for specific actions you can take on each metric useful (as they do tend to make the posts longer, I realize!).