Why you should search your web site and intranet every day

If you want to make sure that your search application is working for your organisation you should search your web site and intranet every day using one of the top 20 search terms from the search logs. Just because everything worked fine when you carried out the upgrade last year is no guarantee that everything will still be working well. I've just searched the Coca Cola UK web site for [recycle] and [recycling] and found no search results even though there is a feature article on the subject on the site. If you search the Shell Petroleum global site for [car] you get a different number of results, and indeed different results than if you had searched for [cars]. Clearly the stemming algorithm is not working correctly.

For each search term look at the results from the perspective of the different personas that you have developed for the web site and intranet. Is the site still delivering relevant content on the first page of results? What is more important is whether there are items missing, perhaps because of a problem with the crawler or a document filter. Sometimes content escapes the CMS with an incorrect title. On the Unilever web site at present there are a number of high relevance results with the title Microsoft Word Document 1, which is perhaps not the image of quality that Unilever would wish to present to site visitors.

The usual response when I suggest this daily task to my clients is that no one has the time to do this quality checking. To me there seems little point in implementating a search application that does not work. Search satisfaction = Quality Content + People + Technology + Patience. The core theme of my book Enterprise Search is that without a search team there is no way in which search can continue to be a useful application to site visitors and/or employees. If a company fails to see the benefit in allocating staff resources to search I then suggest that perhaps the corporate ERP or CRM systems do not need any support either! That usually does the trick.

[bookisbn]9781449330446[/bookisbn]