Lee Romero

Best Bet Governance

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:

• We will accept best bet requests from all users, though most requests come from site publishers on our portal.  Most of our best bets have web sites as targets, though about 30% have individual pieces of published content (documents) as targets.  As managers of the search solution, my team will also identify best bets when appropriate.
• When we receive a request for a new best bet, we review the request against the following the following criteria:
  • No more than five targets can be identified for any one search term, though we prefer to keep it to one or two targets.
    • Any request for a best bet that would result in more than 2 targets for the search term forces a review of usage of the targets (usage is measured by our web analytics solution for both sites and published content).
    • The overall usage of the targets will identify if one or more targets should be dropped.
  • For a given target, no more than 20 individual search terms can be identified.  Typically, we try to keep this to fewer than 5 when possible.
  • If a target is identified as a best bet target that has not had a best bet search term associated with it previously, we confirm that it is either a highly used piece of content or that it is a significant new piece that is highly known or publicized (or may soon be by way of some type of marketing).
  • We also review the search terms identified for the best bet.  We will not use search terms with little to no usage during the previous 3 months.
  • We will not set up a best bet search term that matches the title of the target.  The relevancy algorithm for our search engine heavily weights titles, so this is not necessary.
  • We do prefer that the best bet search terms do have a logical connection to the title or summary of the target.  This ensures that a user will understand the connection between their search terms and a resulting best bet.  This is not a hard requirement, but a preference.  We do allow for spelling variants, synonyms, pluralized forms, etc.
  • We prefer terms that use words from our global taxonomy.
• Our governance (management process, really) for managing best bets includes:.
  • Our search analyst reviews the usage of each best bet term.
    • If usage over an extended time is too low to warrant the best bet term, it is removed.
  • We also plan to use path analysis (pending some enhancements needed as this is written) to determine if, for specific terms, the best bet selections are used preferentially.  If that is found to not be the case, our intent is that the best bet target is removed.
  • We have integrated the best bet management into both our site life cycle process and our content life cycle
    • With the first, when we are retiring a site or changing the URL of a site we know to remove or update the best bet target
    • With the second, as content is retired, the best bets are removed
    • In each of these cases, we also evaluate the terms to see if there could be other good targets to use.

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!