When you’re searching for a document in your enterprise content management (ECM) system, sometimes you type in a keyword and instantly find what you need. At other times, you get nothing. How do you know if your company’s search tools are subpar?
Testing The Effectiveness Of Your Search Tools
The search tools that organizations use internally often lag behind the expectations of users, based on their experiences with internet search engines like Bing and Google. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to test your search capabilities and figure out if search software is working well for your organization.
Essentially, you’ll want to track the results as a number of users initiate a series of searches. Try to standardize the types of searches being performed, perhaps by asking users to search for particular documents.
With each user, count the number of seconds it takes them to find the intended content. If your users consistently find the right content in fewer than 30 seconds, that’s a good indicator of effective search. If it takes 30 seconds to a minute, that’s too long. While it’s not uncommon to find cases where it takes even longer for a user to find anything, that’s a clear sign you have a problem.
Strategies For Improving Search Results
How well your search tools perform depends on a few different factors. The sophistication of your tools obviously plays a big role, and today’s enterprise search technology far outstrips the capabilities in older ECM systems. If you’re using legacy tools, you might want to consider updating your search engine.
While the sophistication of your search software is important, there’s also something to be said about the ways you’re indexing and contextualizing your content. Think about what happens if you type the keyword “mountains” into a search engine like Google. The search engine tries to analyze the context in order to deliver results that line up with the meaning behind your request. If you’re looking for the nearest mountain hiking, for example, you don’t need a list of the world’s tallest mountains by height.
Google and Bing are such powerful search engines because they have teams of analysts and programmers who are constantly analyzing the keywords you use to search and then contextualizing the results returned to you, based on what you click. Over time, the search engine gets “smarter” in how it responds to your requests.
SharePoint and Office 365 include an industry-leading enterprise search engine that Microsoft purchased and adapted for these platforms. Office 365 includes a tool that combines search with behavior analysis, called Delve on Office Graph.
Delve on Office Graph incorporates machine-learning technology that gradually learns to suggest content and other relevant results. The technology works by analyzing your searches and your colleagues’ searches and tracking your activities in the Office 365 environment.
Even if you don’t have access to these machine-learning capabilities, you’re still able to contextualize your content through thoughtful taxonomy design and applying metadata. Search engines have usually functioned by registering metadata values as part of the index and weighting them, building the contextual relationships that inform search.
Whether you use machine learning or manual curating terms and metadata, building these taxonomical relationships allow you to manipulate and improve the relevancy of the results that you get from your search engine.
Learn more about the benefits of today’s enterprise search capabilities by downloading our free white paper, “The Business Value Of Office 365 To The Enterprise”.
