The Searchmaster's Toolbox - David Hawking, Funnelback Search

The SearchMaster's Toolbox Westminster Abbey 31 March 2010 David Hawking

Funnelback Overview
Hosted (SaaS) search
Web sites
Portals
Enterprise search
Intranets/Web
Databases
File shares
Corporate repositories (e.g. Lotus, TRIM, SharePoint and others)
Search Applications
Geospatial
Plagiarism detection
E-commerce
Contracted Development & Professional Services

UK Customers
From pre-2009 : Staffordshire University, Scottish Care Commission
From 2009 :The Electoral Commission, Digital UK, Hargreaves Lansdown
From 2010 : London School of Economics and Political Science, Incisive Media, British Medical Journal, East Ayrshire Council, ...

First UK Customer - 2004

Funnelback Cloud How we deliver search Funnelback Enterprise Funnelback Hosted ABC Instant scalability and redundancy A fully managed search service that’s instantly scalable and redundant through our specialised search cloud environment. Funnelback Cloud can be deployed in days, not months. For web sites and online catalogues, complete control over the look and feel allows a seamless experience for your users Dedicated and fully managed A fully managed search service hosted on dedicated hardware that’s especially architected to meet the most challenging search environments. For web sites and online catalogues, complete control over the look and feel allows a seamless experience for your users Self managed Complete control over the Funnelback search software on a self-managed Windows or Linux platform. Our search experts can help your organisation search across web sites, intranets, database, file shares, SharePoint sites, TRIM, staff directories and other repositories in a single query.

“ We have been extremely happy with the product and the overall service. We have significant search volume and Funnelback has stood up to the test” Mary Ramsay National Manager Interactive Services

Funnelback Enterprise XML Relational Databases e.g. Oracle, MS SQL Web Sites Shared Drives G: Intranet Images Corporate Repositories e.g. Lotus TRIM SharePoint

“ Funnelback has taken our complex internal information environment and made it accessible” Mike Swanson, Oxfam Knowledge and Information Services Team Leader

“ Search is life”

Costs of poor search
Butler Group: Up to 10% of salary costs wasted through ineffective search
IDC: A company with 1000 information workers can expect to waste more than $5M p.a. due to poor search
Accenture: A survey of 1000 middle managers spend as long as 2 hrs/day searching for information.

Who's the SearchMaster in your organisation?

Stakeholders expect every SearchMaster to do her duty!
To make external website search work
Sales conversions
Information dissemination
Reduced inquiry handling load
To provide effective search of corporate information
Happy, productive employees (plus students and other stakeholders)

Give them the tools and they will do the job!
Searchmaster
End-user
Simple
Powerful

1. The basic search tool
Coverage and scale
Quick and easy to install
Good out-of-the-box performance
It can find the answers people want
Simple to configure
Avoid features which are too complex to use or set up.

Time to set up Funnelback
As little as a couple of minutes to install the product.
As little as a couple of minutes to create a collection and start updating
A couple of hours to customise look and feel
A few minutes to activate contextual navigation, faceting and featured pages.

Perceived Funnelback advantages
Tried and tested algorithm (20 yrs dev.t)
Control from admin interface
Customisability of business logic / Open APIs
Flexible result presentation
Professional services model
Open published price list

2. FineTuning
Every search deployment is different
Web, database, fileshare, Lotus
The weighting of ranking features must accommodate to the differences
Manual tweaking is fraught with danger
Fix one query, break a dozen
Make a test file and use Funnelback FineTune

Spreadsheet testfile

Testfile Desiderata
Representative of real workload
Unbiased sample
Good estimate of actual performance
Best tuning
Many queries (e.g. > 100)
Multiple weighted answers (where applicable)

Break to Demo of FineTuning (based on popular/important queries and data from LSE)

Other LSE Testfiles
Click logs – Right answers are those that users clicked
Possible to tune to 0% failure rate (unrealistic)
From keymatches file created for previous search technology(it had 709 rules)
Failure rate is higher (unrealistic)
Random sample is the preferred approach

FineTuning Summary
Tuning 38 dimensions
Millions of query executions
Achieves substantial gains
Contact [email_address]

But why do some queries still fail?
Misspelled
Westminister Abbie
Query words don't match language
“ door” or “MOPEM” v. “manually operated personnel egress mechanism”
There is no answer to that question.
Maybe there should be
Scope issue?
How information is published.

Need more tools!

3. Spelling suggestion tools
Suggestions may be useful even if words are correctly spelled:
Carlton furball club -> Carlton football club
Suggestions based on whole query, not word-by-word
Don't suggest queries which make no sense in the collection being searched
Autocompletion: Guide users to the best query
Context is king

4. Query expansion tools
Manual rules:
Rego -> [registration rego]
MOPEM ->[“manually operated personnel egress mechanism door”]
Related queries (automatic)
Based on co-clicking
Contextual navigation (on-the-fly)
Finding superphrases in a deep result set
Faceting (semi-automatic)

Related queries

Tools to tell you when you need to add, change or reorganize content.

5. Reporting Tools
Queries that produced no results
Click patterns that suggest user wasn't happy
Pattern analysis – query spike

Reporting

Query Spike - LPG

Pattern Analyser

Pattern Analyser - Timeplot

Conclusions
Search is important
Organisations benefit when someone takes responsibility for effective search – the SearchMaster.
A good search tool provides a full kit of simple, effective tools to help the SearchMaster achieve just that.

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The Searchmaster's Toolbox - David Hawking, Funnelback Search

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The Searchmaster’s Toolbox - David Hawking, Funnelback Search — Presentation Transcript