Funnelback Seminar: The Search Master's Toolbox - David Hawking
At the Funnelback UK Seminar on the 31st of March, David Hawking, pre-eminent information retrieval researcher and Funnelback's Chief Scientist, gave a talk on the need for a Search Master within all but the smallest organisations. Even if there isn't an individual with that specific job title, the responsibility for maintaining, improving and monitoring search needs to be prioritised and clearly assigned. David's talk covered the reasons why search is so vitally important and the tools which can improve search results.
Here are the slides from David's talk followed by an overview of its key messages:
The Search Master's Toolbox - David Hawking, Funnelback Search
Key Points:
- All but the smallest organisations should have a Search Master to ensure that information and services are discoverable to both internal and external users. At the very least the responsibility for search needs to be clearly assigned.
- Poor search is costly. It damages conversion rates and sales, makes employees less productive, wastes the value of information and increases the cost of support services such as call centres. The Butler Group estimate that up to 10% of salary costs are wasted through ineffective search.
- External website search needs to work effectively in order to deliver sales conversions, information dissemination and cost reduction of query handling. Both the Search Master and the end-user require simple, yet powerful tools, in order to achieve this.
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Funnelback's key advantages:
- A tried and tested algorithm (20 years of development)
- A powerful and easy to use administration interface
- Customisable business logic and open API
- Flexible result presentation
- A professional services and support model
- An open published price list
- David demonstrated Funnelback's Fine Tuning feature, which optimises search results. A testfile of query terms, based on a sample of real-life queries, and their preferred URL results, is loaded into the system to adjust ranking automatically. This saves time and effort of manual tuning and has a much more positive effect on search result success rates.
- Additional tools provided by Funnelback Search include: Query expansions to specify known synonyms, related queries which are automatically suggested by the system based on user behaviour over time and Contextual Navigation which provides sub-topics for search queries without the need to adjust metadata.
- Funnelback includes reports and analytics to help to discover content which needs to be ammended, restructured of added. For example a report on queries which returned no results can suggest information that is required by the user, but missing. In a similar way, Funnelback's Pattern Analyser is a powerful tool which detects spikes in query traffic which can suggest changes which are required for both the organisation's content and the organisation as a whole.
Read more from the Funnelback Seminar
Published:
06 Apr 2010 3:10pm
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