Establishing a Search Strategy (excerpt)
Andy Caddy
Paul Rudman When people set out
to design a web site, search strategy isn't always on the top of
the priority list. This is understandable; the bigger goal is in sight,
the detail of the user experience hasn't yet been explored, but
experience dictates that search strategy needs to be established right
at the forefront of the project.
Before you even start to think about evaluating technology and designing search results pages, the first step is to really understand what function your search tool is performing. It sounds obvious doesn't it? Well, just like the web site itself there is a myriad of requirements that search can be satisfying. It could be a product locator, a browse facility, an alternative navigation method or tool to serve up common queries. It is important that you decide now before you commit your hard earned budget as changing tack later is going to be far more difficult.
So lets break down the requirements into the fundamentals of what a search tool is there to do :-
Input of the query
How is the user going to key in their search term? Will it be keyword
driven or via "Ask Jeeves" style natural language. Perhaps drop
down menus will store fixed queries or previously saved searches. What
languages will users be inputting and will there be a choice?
Normalisation
As the input is processed by the engine, will additional synonyms
be added? Will an extensive thesaurus be used for like terms and is fuzzy
searching preferable to exact matching?
Execution
How important is the search response time? Is there a trade off
of accuracy against the time taken to execute? Will the search be required
to span multiple indexes or perform federated searches from other internal
or external data sources?
Indexing
How much content are you planning to index? Will it just be plain
spidering or is something more 'low level' required such as
database connectors to pull out specific metadata? How important is the
time taken to index the content and how often will the search index be
refreshed and updated?
Results Modification
Will vanilla results suffice or is more user control required?
Are there specific sorts orders needed or even personalised views of the
results? Do the results need to be filtered for security or relevancy
using business rules?
Display
How important is the presentation of the results? How configurable
do you want this to be? Do you want different views for different users?
Are features such as viewing the results in context or similar terms important.
From a detailed analysis of the purpose of your site and the subsequent function expected of your search tool it should be possible to get to an accurate list of business requirements. This could be a simple tick list or a more detailed specification of requirements, whichever, it will be your yard stick against which contenders will be measured.
On top of this you will need to factor in three other major business considerations:
- The limitations of your technical infrastructure; are you constrained in any way by operating system, hardware, interoperability?
- Extensibility; will you be satisfied at just search, or will you want classification, metrics, personalisation at some later point in time?
- Budget; search solutions range from free to multi-million and many will have to be dismissed purely from a budgetary standpoint.
The full text of this article can be found on the Knowledge
Management website.