1. In Search for a Good Practice of
Finding Information
Kristian Norling
IT strategic department
Region Västra Götaland
KristianNorling

2. Region Västra Götaland
Public sector
50.000 employees

4. © Region Västra Götaland

5. Outline
1. Persistence and why it's important for a better
search experience
2. The importance of user feedback
3. Why metadata can be good and bad at the
same time
4. How to use search (without searching) to give
the users the right information at the right time

6. “Wish our search was like Google”

7. “Not Google, but a good effort”

8. http://hitta.vgregion.se/search.xhtml
Swedish only

9. 1. Persistence
Getting search to work takes time,
lots of time...
....and plenty of hard work
• Start with the search strategy
• Any search engine will do
• Statistics! Statistics! Statistics!
• And some analysis too...

10. hitta (Swe) = find
Scope Report generated:
Show stats for: today, latest week, month, year
Choose time period
Show stats
N:o searches this year Most common search queries
Query N.o:
Search queries giving 0 results

11. 1. Persistence
• User centered
• Effect management

13. 1. Persistence
• Interaction design
• Interface problem? Do it like Google...
• Usage analysis (=use tests)

14. 7 design principles
http://www.slideshare.net/kristiannorling/search-find-and-destroy

15. 1. Persistence
• Find your information silos
• Analyze them (and add to index)
• After publishing information - take
responsibility for findability
• Information that cannot be found has
NO value

16. You all have a CMS...
...and people working it?

17. Do you have a search solution?
And how many are working on it?

18. For every editor
also hire a search editor

19. 1. Persistence
Work with:
• Content owners
• Information Management
• The Users

20. 2. User feedback
• Good feedback = gold
• Catch them when they are mad (or glad)
• Answer promptly
• Many bugs found
• Best suggestions
• Combine with search stats for good
analysis

23. “Hope you have good medication”
Martin White, Workshop on Search in 2009.

24. 3. Metadata
• Metadata is a blessing for search
- and a curse for editors
• Metadata is also boring to add
- but very useful
• Wrong metadata is bad for search
- better to have none
• Good metadata is search engine heaven

25. 3. Metadata
• Good metadata needs:
• Taxonomies (and master metadata)
• User input via tagging
• Metadata schemas (org. standardised)
• Semantic markup is even better
• Start with Microformats

27. Automated information retrieval

28. Contextual information retrieval

29. Automagic search

30. 4. Automagic search
• Opensearch
• Atom - pubsubhubbub
• Watch out for search terms in the
information flow -> add to user stream
• Send alerts by Atom/Mail/Twitter

31. 4. Automagic search
Mobile:
• Use the GPS: Location Based Information
• Use the camera: Scan QR codes
• Personalized - it is a personal device

35. What is your Search Maturity Level?
http://www.searchtechnologies.com/searchchronicles/search-maturity-level.html

36. Questions?

37. Interested in contributing to a wiki/book
project to create an “Introduction to
intranets”?
We need you!
Follow @intranintro and check out the wiki:
http://introductiontointranets.com/wiki/
Main_Page

38. Thank you!
kristian.norling@vgregion.se
sys64738.se
twitter.com/kristiannorling
www.slideshare.net/kristiannorling
www.linkedin.com/in/kristiannorling