Tag Archives: Knowledge representation

Findability on an E-commerce Site

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Findability on any e-commerce site is a beast all on its own. What if visitors’ searches return no results? Will they continue to search or did you lose your chance at a sale?

While product findability is a key factor of success in e-commerce, it is predominantly enabled by simple search alone. And while simple search usually doesn’t fulfill complex needs among users, website developers and owners still regard advanced search as just another boring to-do item during development. Owners won’t go so far as to leave it out, because every e-commerce website has some kind of advanced search functionality, but they probably do not believe it brings in much revenue.

Research shows:

  • 50% of online buyers go straight to the search function
  • 34% of visitors leave the site if they can’t find an (available) product
  • Buyers are more likely than Browsers to use search (91%)

What can’t be found, can’t be bought:

  • Search is often mission critical in e-commerce
  • Users don’t know how to spell
  • Users often don’t even know how to describe it

First of all, Findability can accelerate the sales process. And faster sales can increase conversions, because you will not be losing customers who give up trying to find products. Furthermore, fast, precise and successful searches increase your customers’ trust.

On both e-commerce and shopping comparison sites, users can find products in two different ways: searching and browsing. Searching obviously means using the site search whilst browsing involves drilling down through the categories provided by the website. The most common location for a site search on e-commerce sites is at the top of the page, and generally on the right side. Many e-commerce sites have a site search, user login, and shopping cart info all located in the same general area. Keeping the site search in a location that is pretty common will help it to be easier to find for some of your visitors who are accustomed to this trend.

Faceted search should be the de facto standard for an e-commerce website. When a user performs a simple search first, but then on the results page, he or she can narrow the search through a drill-down link (for a single choice) or a check box selection (for multiple non-overlapping choices). The structure of the search results page must also be crystal clear. The results must be ranked in a logical order (i.e. for the user, not for you) by relevance. Users should be able to scan and comprehend the results easily. Queries should be easy to refine and resubmit, and the search results page should show the query itself.

Spell-check is also crucial. Many products have names that are hard to remember or type correctly. Users might think to correct their misspelling when they find poor results, but they will be annoyed at having to do that… or worse, they might think that the website either doesn’t work properly or does not have their product.

Query completion can decrease the problems caused by mistyping or not knowing the proper terminology. Queries usually start with words; so unambiguous character inputting is crucial.

Search analytics, contextual advertisement and behavioral targeting is more than just finding a page or a product. When people search they tell you something about their interests, time, location and what is in demand right now, they say something about search quality by the way they navigate and click in result pages and finally what they do after they found what they were looking for.

A good e-commerce solution uses search technology to:

  • Dynamically tailor a site to suit the visitors’ interests
  • Help the user to find and explore
  • Relate information and promote up- and cross sales
  • Improve visitor satisfaction
  • Increase stickiness
  • Increase sales of related products or accessories
  • Inspire visitors to explore new products/areas
  • Provide-increased understanding of visitor needs/preferences

–> Convert visitors into returning customers!

The Difference Between Search and Findability

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Enterprise Search and Findability What is Different?

Is “Findability” only a buzzword to describe the same thing as before when talking about search solutions, or does it bring something new to the discussion? I’d like to think the latter and this week I read a blog post describing the difference between search and findability in a very good way. I couldn’t have written it better myself.

For the lazy one, I’ve picked a quote that is the key element in the post:

Findability: introducing the robot waiter

Imagine you’re in a futuristic restaurant and when the robot waiter approaches, you ask for ‘ham and cheese omelette’. In response he just shrugs his robotic shoulders and says ‘not found – please try again.’ You then have to keep guessing until you find a match for something you’d like to order.

Now imagine a second futuristic restaurant where the robot waiter says ‘Mr Grimes, how lovely to see you, the last time you visited you had A and B and gave them a 5 star rating. People who ordered x, also ordered y and found that the wines a, b and c went really well with it.’At first restaurant the menu was searchable (though regrettably the ‘ham and cheese omelette’ query didn’t match anything), at the second restaurant the menu was findable.

To me, this analogy is spot-on. I dare to say that making content searchable is more of a technical issue while reaching great findability requires understanding of the business. Why is that?

Well, making a content repository searchable you “only” need to hook up a connector, index the repository and display a search box to the users. To succeed with this, it doesn’t matter if the content is movie reviews, user manuals, recipes, a product catalog or whatever. What you need to know is the format of the repository (is it a SQL database, file system, ECM, etc.).

But if you want your users to find what they want in your repositories, business knowledge is a requirement. It’s true that you help your users find information by implementing technical stuff like query completion, facets, did-you-mean, synonym dictionaries, etc. But if they are to be of any help you need to present facets that are useful, populate the synonym dictionary with terms used in your organisation,etc. For example, a good synonym file targeted towards nurses and doctors would be very different compared to one targeted at employees at an insurance company.

Findability Blog: Wrapping up the 2010 posts

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Christmas is finally here and at Findwise we are taking a few days off to spend time with family and friends.

During 2010 we’ve delivered more than 25 successful projects, arranged breakfast seminars to talk about customer solutions (based on Microsoft, IBM, Autonomy and Open source), meet-ups in a number of cities as well as networking meetings for profound Findability discussions and moving in parties for our new offices.

At our Findability blog we have been discussing technology and vendor solutions (Microsoft and FAST, Autonomy, IBM, Google and open source), research,  conferences, customized solutions and how to find a balance between technology and people.

Some of our posts have resulted in discussions, both on our own blog and in other forums. Please get involved in some of the previous ongoing discussions on “Solr Processing Pipeline”,  “Search and Business Intelligence” or “If a piece of content is never read, does it exist?”  if you have thoughts to share.

Findability blog is taking a break and we will be back with new posts is January.

If you have some spare time during the vacation some of customers run their own blogs, and good reading tips within Findability are the blogs driven by Kristian Norling (VGR) and Alexandra Larsson (Swedish armed forces).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

If a Piece of Content is Never Read, Does it Really Exist?

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Since ancient times, information technology has developed from carvings in rock and wood to cell phones and Facebook. Still, the basic purpose remains the same; to facilitate communication between people separated by space and time. Therefore one can measure the successfulness of any information tool by two axes: how easy it is to create information and how easy it is to consume it. Being a Findability expert, I spend a large part of my life focusing on the latter. Therefore it troubles me that so many organizations wait so long when they are introducing new content management systems before looking at search. If I had a nickel for every time I heard “we are currently busy with building our new intranet/web page/collaboration tool and will look at search when the project is finished” I would definitely have had a few quarters by now.

I like to say that I am in the information marketing business. What I mean by that is that Findability is all about marketing information so that the consumers, your employees, can find the piece of information they need. And just as an industrialist would not construct a factory before doing a marketing plan, you should not build a new information repository without thinking about how the content created in that repository will reach its target audience. When marketing information, search is one of your most important channels.

While a enterprise search solution can definitely smooth out imperfections in information structure and quality using intelligent algorithms, spending a little time thinking about how you can make it easier for a search engine to deliver relevant results presented in a user friendly way can really make it shine. Some questions you can ask yourself are:

  • How can we make tagging so convenient that we have good metadata for presenting and filtering results using facets? Many search solutions have automated tagging functionality to take load off users.
  • How can we use search as an integration platform to pull in content from other sources instead of making costly one-time integrations?
  • How will the new information repository fit into an existing search solution, for example are we changing the metadata model and how should the documents be ranked compared to other sources?
  • Should we migrate content from an old system to the new one or just freeze information creation in the old one and have a search box that let’s the user find information from both?
  • Can we use search to avoid creating duplicate information by encouraging users to make searches before typing new content or even doing implicit searches while the user is typing?

So does a piece of content that no one ever reads exist? Well in terms of bits on a disk in a data center, yes, but in terms of business value definitely no. Designing your information repository for Findability will have great returns in improved efficiency and user satisfaction.

Apache Nutch Making Use of Open Pipeline

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During the last couple of months I’ve been working on a project for Uppsala University. The project’s goal is to improve the findability on the university web site. The solution that we are working on is based on Apache Nutch 1.1 in conjunction with Apache Solr 1.4. Nutch provides us with a robust web crawler that scales very well and also gives us a page rank for each page that we can use for relevance tuning. Besides the web information crawled by Nutch, the search application will also be used to search people and organizational information that we index from another source. I thought that I would share some details on how we are using Nutch.

We have made two extensions to Nutch, one is a parser plug-in that can run Open Pipeline embedded in it. This was an important extension in order to get better control of the information that we index to Solr and also to be able to reuse our different Open Pipeline components. The main stages of the pipeline are the following:

  1. Extract the encoding of a web page
  2. Extract all links from a web page
  3. Extract all headings (hx) from a web page
  4. Remove all tags that don’t contain complete sentences on a web page
  5. Extract text and metadata from different types of documents with Tika
  6. Do some metadata mapping and cleaning
  7. Populate facets according to metadata and/or URL
  8. Do static URL ranking
  9. Replace certain common titles with the largest heading of the web page

The other extension we made to Nutch is an indexing filter that makes sure all our metadata fields are indexed to Solr.

So far so good. The fetching, parsing and indexing works well now and currently our largest challenge is tuning all the different relevance parameters we have, as well as harmonizing the relevance of web information to that of people and organizational information. I will have to get back to you on how that went!

Metadata in Focus for Our Findability Solution

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Last week Kristian Norling wrote a blog post about how they work with metadata at Västra Götalands Regionen (VGR). In the beginning of his post he states that metadata is boring, but extremely useful. A teacher in statistics that I had in college used to say that statistics is the most boring thing there is. It’s the things that you can do with statistics that makes it really interesting. So I agree with both of them, the metadata (or statistics) in itself is quite boring, but the things you can do with it is what makes it all worth it. The quality and structure of information must also be in focus when creating Findability solutions that aim to provide easy access to all information inside and outside the firewall.

Findwise is currently working on improving our findability solution which is our intranet. When we investigated our own business and user needs we learned that there is a need for a more flexible way of organizing information so it can be found from different entrypoints as well as in different contexts. Therefore one of the things at the heart of our intranet (except the search functionality off course) is metadata. As a fast growing  (and changing) company we find it hard to create and maintain one single information hierarchy that is intuitive and self-evident to all our employees.  Instead we are working with a taxonomy with a simple set of categories and concepts. All content is tagged with what, where and who.

Who describes which people or groups are allowed to see a document. It can be everyone, a single person or a group of people such as the finance department, or a project team. Since knowledge sharing is very important for our organization most of the information is open for everyone to see and use.

Where describes which sites the content should be visible on. A single document can be visible on several sites. So if contact details for a customer is relevant to show on several projects for that customer the same content can be displayed on all the different project sites, without us having to store duplicate versions of the content.

What describes the concepts the content relates to. These concepts include customers, projects, products & competences, information types as well as categories that are created through the means of user generated tagging. This way one single document does not have to belong to one specific site or folder, but can be displayed in several different and all relevant locations on the intranet. Thanks to this use of metadata it is also possible to use the different categories for search and faceted navigation. For example I can view all design specifications from different customer projects that include the concept faceted navigation, or all information about how to work with search analytics with the search platform Autonomy IDOL. The concepts and the information becomes the focus instead of the location where it is stored.

In the first stage this will be done manually as content is added to the intranet. In the future it would also be of interest for us to utilize the same type of service that we developed for VGR, for our own content. But instead of using controlled vocabularies such as MeSH we use our own taxonomy and the power of search technology to suggest or automatically add appropriate customers, projects and categories for a document. A first step in this will probably be to use entity extraction techniques to identify and automatically tag already existing documents with concepts such as customers and search platforms.

We hope to share our experiences from this project with you in the future. In the mean while I recommend that you read Kristian’s post about how they use different types of keyword metadata at VGR.

Metadata: What is it and What is it Good for?

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After reading a blog post explaining the word stemming, I started thinking about other words that are commonly used in a findability solution and might need some explanation. The word that first came to my mind was metadata which is inevitable when you’re talking about Findability. So what is Metadata and why do we need it?

According to Wikipedia, metadata is defined as data about data. That might sound a bit abstract, but what it means is that metadata provides a bit more information about some content whether it’s a piece of text, an image, a video or something else. For a text metadata can be the file format it’s stored as (plain text, word, pdf, etc) and for an image metadata can be the resolution of the image.

Metadata can be divided into different types. Exactly what the types are is not set but  I like to think of it as either a) technical or b) descriptive.

Technical metadata represents “hard” types assigned automatically by systems like file type, file size, creation date, encoding etc. Descriptive metadata represents more “soft” information assigned by humans like author, title, summary, keywords, category etc.

Technical metadata is often a finite set that can be common accross organisations, where descriptive metadata is more related to the organisation’s needs and structure.

So all this talk about metadata, why do we need to worry about this in a findability solution? Well, since metadata tells us a bit more about our content, we should use this to help our users to find their information quicker. I like to think that it can be used in at least three ways in a findability solution; relevance influence, navigation, and result presentation.

So if you define descriptive metadata that makes sense to the users in your organisation, they are very likely to assign them to content they are creating. When content has a high degree of metadata assigned you can use this to help users navigate to the content by using the metadata instead of a fixed folder-like structure. When searching, you can tune the relevance so that if the user’s query matches content in the metadata of the document, it is ranked higher than other documents.

The important thing about metadata is that if you can make users assign it to their content it can be used in many different ways and applications to help people find their content quickly.

Findability by Findwise

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Being the hosts of “The Search and Findability blog”, we believe it is time to define and explain what Findwise means by these terms and how they relate.

“Findability” is not a new term or concept. As stated on Wikipedia, Peter Morville is often credited for having introduced the term and it is used in different areas related to the quality of being locatable or navigable either in terms of finding information in the digital world or geographical locations.

“Search” is, at least in the world of IT, commonly associated with either Google on the web, or a search box in the corner of the company Intranet or other websites. Most people have positive experiences from searching with Google on the web but rather poor, sometimes even terrible, experiences from searching at company websites and in internal systems and applications.

Simple search box

The primary focus of Findwise is to improve the experience and benefits from using search technology in the corporate setting. By itself, we don’t believe that the term “Search” or even “Enterprise Search” fully reflects this focus as it limits the scope of search technology to being “just” the search box in the website corner, which often provides undesirable results. From experience, we know that modern search technology can be utilised in multiple ways to fulfil the needs of an organisation to make information accessible both to their employees and customers. The search box is only one way. Therefore, to support and explain our aims and focus in relation to search technology, we have defined the concept of “Findability by Findwise”.

Findability by Findwise expands the area of search and value of search technology by taking a holistic approach to the challenge of creating business value from internal and external information assets. Findability by Findwise is all about maximising the customer business value gained from search technology investments. Making sure that search technology is implemented and utilised to best support and strengthen the business processes and help the organisation to reach its business goals.

The value generated by the Findability solution could be both:

  • Internal; Improving employee efficiency and their ability to truly benefit from existing information assets and previous investments in various systems to store and structure information.
  • External; Making sure stakeholders can access the information they need in order to become or remain profitable customers.

From the statement above, it is easy to understand that to gain the desired effects and value of search technology investments, it is not enough only to focus on and master the actual technology. Or as stated in an AIIM report from 2008:

“Findability is more about a well-defined and executed strategy model than it is about technology.”

AIIM Market IQ Intelligence Quarterly Q2 2008

Therefore, a Findability solution by Findwise creates true customer business value, i.e. it makes desired information accessible to internal or external stakeholders, by;

BOTH using the full potential of search technology,
AND focusing on the four other critical dimensions of Findability:

  • Business - The use of search technology should support and leverage the existing business processes.
  • Users - The solution must be designed and tailored to fit the needs and capabilities of the users.
  • Information - The quality and structure of existing and newly produced information is an important success factor of the solution.
  • Organisation - The organisation must establish a process to govern the solution and maintain Findability for future needs.

We have chosen the symbol of a flower to illustrate the concept and dimensions of Findability by Findwise:

Findability by Findwise

In other words, the beauty and health of the Findability Flower™ can be likened to the extent to which search technology is utilised to support and leverage the organisation’s business needs and goals. That is what Findability by Findwise is all about.

Visit our website to read more about Findability by Findwise and how we work to create Findability solutions that make our customers truly benefit from state-of-the-art search technology.

Search and Accessibility

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Västra Götalands regionen has introduced a new search solution that Findwise created together with Netrelations. Where both search and accessibility is important. We have also blogged about it earlier (see How to create better search – VGR leads the way). One important part of the creation of this solution was to create an interface that is accessible to everyone.

Today the web offers access to information and interaction for people around the world. But many sites today have barriers that make it difficult, and sometimes even impossible for people with different disabilities to navigate and interact with the site. It is important to design for accessibility  – so that no one is excluded because of their disabilities.

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact and contribute to the Web. But web accessibility is not only for people that use screen readers, as is often portrayed. It is also for people with just poor eyesight who need to increase the text size or for people with cognitive disabilities (or sometimes even for those without disabilities). Web accessibility can benefit people without disabilities, such as when using a slow Internet connection, using a mobile phone to access the web or when someone is having a broken arm. Even such a thing as using a web browser without javascript because of company policy can be a disability on the web and should be considered when designing websites.

So how do you build accessible websites?

One of the easiest things is to make sure that the xhtml validates. This means that the code is correct, adheres to the latest standard from W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and that the code is semantically correct i.e. that the different parts of the website use the correct html ”tags” and in the correct context. For example that the most important heading of a page is marked up with ”h1” and that the second most important is ”h2” (among other things important when making websites accessible for people using screen readers).

It is also important that a site can easily be navigated only by keyboard, so that people who cannot use a mouse still can access the site. Here it is important to test in which order the different elements of the web page is selected when using the keyboard to navigate through the page. One thing that is often overlooked is that a site often is inaccessible for people with cognitive disabilities because the site contains content that uses complex words, sentences or structure. By making content less complex and more structured it  will be readable for everyone.

Examples from VGR

In the search application at VGR elements in the interface that use javascript will only be shown if the user has a browser with java script enabled. This will remove any situations where elements do not do anything because java script is turned off. The interface will still be usable, but you will not get all functionality. The VGR search solution also works well with only the keyboard, and there is a handy link that takes the user directly to the results. This way the user can skip unwanted information and navigation.

How is accessibility related to findability?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/4274260576/in/set-72157623208480316/

Search and Accessibility

Accessibility is important for findability because it is about making search solutions accessible and usable for everyone. The need to find information is not less important if you are blind,  if you have a broken arm or if you have dyslexia. If you cannot use a search interface you cannot find the information you need.

“what you find changes who you become” -Peter Morville

In his book Search Patterns Peter Morville visualizes this in the ”user experience honeycomb”. As can been seen in the picture accessibility is as much a part of the user experience as usability or findability is and a search solution will be less usable without any of them.

Welcome to the Enterprise Search and Findability Blog!

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The Enterprise Search and Findability Blog is here. As some of you already know, Findwise has been blogging at findwise.se for several years now. However, we thought it was time to separate the blog from our web site and create a forum especially dedicated to the exciting area of findability, the Enterprise Search and Findability Blog. From a Findwise perspective, findability is the art of making information easy to find by using (enterprise) search technology, this regardless of when the information is needed or where it may be stored.

Here we invite you to learn more about findability and we welcome you to give us feedback and keep a dialogue with us. We will, among other things, keep you updated on relevant research within the findability area, exciting search functionality and news about enterprise search vendors.

New Features at the Search and Findability Blog

Our new blog includes features that were not available in our previous blog. These are: rss subscription, Findwise Twitter feed and the possibility to share information via other social medias. We hope and believe our readers will appreciate these features and we are looking forward to discussing with you here at the Enterprise Search and Findability Blog.