Optimizing Web Site Search

Nowadays businesses spend a lot of time thinking about search and how it relates to their Web sites and a lot of money trying to come up with ways to improve how their sites relate to search.

But for many businesses this takes the form of an almost exclusive focus on improving their visibility to Google and boosting their site ranking through a variety of search engine optimization techniques. And while SEO can be effective, it is also in many ways a black art, with even the best SEO practitioners feeling that they have little control over the changes and whims in search that Google enacts.

The funny thing is that there is an area of search that these businesses have much greater control over but that they pay much less attention to or even ignore outright. And this is the search capabilities of their own Web sites.

When it comes to how users find information and content on your site, a well-implemented search engine can pay real dividends in helping users find what they are looking for. But, strangely, many proprietors of Web sites seem to ignore their own search capabilities, doing little in the way of internal search optimization.

Searching for More Traffic?

There's a saying in baseball circles that a good manager doesn't win games, but a bad manager can lose games. The idea being that a good manager lays the groundwork to give the players the chance to win, but a bad manager's poor decisions can lead directly to a loss.

Whether you believe this or not, it is still an interesting idea and one that often can be seen in places outside of sports. In fact, there's one thing that I've been covering a lot lately--that definitely hurts when done poorly but can only take you so far when done very well.

This is search engine optimization, or SEO. The main idea behind SEO is that by following certain practices and procedures, a Web site can become highly rated by popular search engines such as Google. This increased search engine visibility will lead to increased Web traffic and increased product sales or advertising revenue.

Wikia Makes Search Social

Click the image to see screenshots of Search Wikia in action

Just what the world needs, another search engine. Well, come to think of it, maybe that's exactly what the world needs. Face it there hasn't been a whole lot of innovation and change going on in the search world for the last few years (which is a typical consequence of having one giant vendor like Google dominating a field).

So maybe a new search engine is something to get excited about, especially when it comes from Jimmy Wales, the man who built the Wikipedia online community developed encyclopedia that also happens to dominate the results for most Google searches.

The new search engine from Wales' Wikia Inc. is called appropriately Wikia Search, and an alpha version of the engine became available yesterday, January 7th.

And when they call this an alpha version, they aren't kidding. Much of the basic functionality of Wikia Search is lacking and the search results are just about the exact opposite of exhaustive.

Still, I found myself intrigued by many of the interesting features that Wikia Search is adding to the search engine mix. Top among these ideas is the concept of a social or community oriented search engine.

Erasing Search Tracks

There are lots of things that people like to do on the Internet; read news and blogs, watch videos, shop, you name it. But the one activity that people do more than almost anything else is search. You need to use a search engine to find most of the content that you're interested in.

But while you're out there using popular search sites like Google, is someone else tagging along for the ride? Would it be possible for someone else to put together your search queries and invade your privacy?

The answer definitely seems to be yes. Last year AOL posted a database of search queries that users had done and it quickly became clear that it was not that hard to identify individuals based on groupings of searches.

And of course this is child's play compared to the level of detail that the search engines themselves have about you and your searches. So what can a user concerned about search privacy do?

There are anonymity tools such as the Tor network. And there are some third-party metasearch tools that provide a layer of privacy between users and search engines. But why don't the search engines themselves offer a privacy option?

Podcast: Combining BI and Search

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Dealing with the massive crush of data and information that can be produced by a modern city is a daunting task. To help handle this problem, the city of Albuquerque recently launched a program to combine the strengths of their Cognos business intelligence system, with the easy usability and broad reach of their Google enterprise search solutions.

I recently had the chance to speak with two people who have worked closely on this project; Brian Osterloh, applications development manager for the city of Albuquerque, and Chris Framel, the Technical Program Manager II of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority.

Point BI in the direction of Albuquerque

Most businesses think that they generate a lot of data and information that needs to be managed. But in most cases, this is nothing compared to the amount of data that is created when running a major city, which is sort of like one business that runs and manages many other businesses.

This was the challenge facing the IT department of the city of Albuquerque. The city's CRM system was just one application generating tons of data. "The amount of data we can capture in our CRM system is tremendous," said Brian Osterloh, applications development manager for the city of Albuquerque. "On the other hand, the amount of data we can capture in our CRM system is tremendous. It's a double-edged sword: You have a lot of data--how do you let people know where it is?"

The city had been dealing with all of this data--and more--through the use of business intelligence software from Cognos. The software, which the city had been using since the late 1990's, was initially implemented to handle financial data and human resources.

But as the demands on the Cognos system grew, so too did the difficulty in finding the right information. "As we continued to add functions, it got more and more difficult to find specific data," Osterloh said.

The city also made use of Cognos ReportNet to provide Web access to BI reports. However, if a user couldn't find a necessary report, he or she would ask IT to create one. Or, if the user had the skills, he or she could create the report themselves. However, this sometimes led to the problem of duplicate reports designed to find the same information.

Chris Framel, the Technical Program Manager II of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, who also worked on the city's BI project, said, "With managers and up it would be nice to have a search tool where they can just type in something and go through the hundreds of packages we have and let them find what they want."

Search and BI Make a Great Team

Click to see screenshots
In a classic ad for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, a chocolate eater and a peanut butter eater collide into each other, leading to the immortal lines: "You got chocolate in my peanut butter! You got peanut butter on my chocolate!"

But it isn't only in the world of snack foods where two different things can be combined to create something that's more than the sum of its parts. There are definitely examples in the IT world where similar but distinctly different technologies are combined to create a solution that provides more than either technology could by itself.

One such amalgamation currently gaining steam is the marriage of enterprise search technologies and business intelligence tools. Here, you have two technologies dedicated to the discovery and analysis of data. However, each tends to look at different types of information, and they have radically different approaches to finding that information.

Search tools have for the most part been designed to index and query unstructured data, such as Web sites and document repositories. Search, meanwhile, takes a broad approach to finding data and tends to deliver multiple possible results rather than exact answers.

Another key attribute of search is ease of use. A typical search engine is something that even a novice can quickly use to find information. Business intelligence tools, on the other hand, are based on complex and refined queries that result in exact and complete data results and reports. BI applications thus tend to have a high level of complexity, which has meant that only business analysts or those specifically trained on BI systems could effectively use them.

However, despite their differences, both BI and search are ultimately in the business of discovering information. And when effectively combined, they can provide a much broader and insightful information discovery system.