Search Engines in the fight against Institutional Impecuniousness

IWMW 2011, 26 July 2011 Reading University Search v. Institutional Impecuniousness David Hawking Funnelback

Who am I? - 40 years in university computing (ANU). - 10 years (overlapping) in CSIRO - 5 years (overlapping) Funnelback

Who are we?

Who are you?

What's all this got to do with Search?

HE Institutions are businesses
(A) need to maintain and increase revenue
Attract more (or brighter) students
Attract more (or better) research staff, and consequently more grants and research funding
Attract more (or bigger) endowments
Attract more (or bigger) industrial partnerships
More effective commercialisation of research
(B) need to increase staff productivity (without lowering standards).
Reduce unnecessary time and effort delivering courses, applying for grants, doing research, undertaking commercialisation.
Maximise accessibility of information and online services to all
Reduce student enquiry load

Areas where effective search can help: revenue side

Course Finding
e.g City University
Query completion demo – UPS
Isn't this like e-Commerce?
Avoid: There is a course for this student but they didn't find it. (Faceting, Suggestion)
Conversion: Found the course -> now enrol
Issue: matching careers with courses:
Barrister LLB Doctor MBBS Webmaster MWeb Lighthouse Keeper ?

Expertise finding
e.g Australia's Knowledge Gateway
Researchers, Publications, Projects, Theses
Can facilitate:
Discovery of strengths
Attraction of staff
Attraction of graduate students
Industrial investment
Endowments

Image & Marketing
Websites are vital to marketing a university.
Search is vital to web experience
Key differences between universities and corporates. Websites operated by departments may provide critical information but don't (and possibly shouldn't) conform to corporate image. Search can help integrate them.
Alerting

Business Intelligence
What are people searching for on your sites? Are your campaigns working?

Areas where effective search can help: productivity side

Student enquiry handling
Access to course materials
Course planning
Accommodation
Exams
Timetable
Library
email
Employment / Careers

Video recordings of lectures

Staff efficiency
Locating policies and procedures
Staff directory
Access to online services: parking permits, leave forms, study leave applications,
Gathering material for grant proposals
Finding collaborators
Issue: new staff and position handover
Issue: search of restricted-access material
Issue: academic staff often work remotely, e.g. at home or on important field work …

Search: Issues common to all applications

Overcoming poor queries
Acomodation or is it accomodation or even accommodation?
Autocompletion, did you mean, query blending
Computer science or is it Information Technology or informatics?
Synonyms, query blending, autocompletion .
There's nothing on our site about that! Try the SERC!
Best bets

Queries whose best answers change
'graduation' may have different best answers at different times of the year
Best bets?

Tune your ranking
How well is your search working?
Measure using a test set of queries and right answers
How can you improve it?
Explore the combinations of SE parameters, measuring performance on the test set. Pick the optimum?

LSE Case Study

Test set: 134 queries Query Best answer 2 nd best answer ... accommodation … /lifeatLSE/accommodatiaon/accommodationforStudents.aspx accounting … /accounting/Home.aspx anthropology … /anthropology/Home.aspx asia … /collections/asiaResearchCentre/ ba … /study/undergraduate/degreeProgrammes2012.aspx biomedicine … /collections/BIOS/

dim2 dim1 1 2 3

Challenges in HE ranking

- Hundreds of websites - Up to millions of webpages (what's a webpage?) - Diverse publishing technologies - Corporate branding & messages slow to propagate to the outposts. - Outdated content still present (may be useful) Official web site(s) 100s of less official web sites

But search effectiveness is a two-way street: Search and Publishing are in a symbiotic relationship

The “Emmottiser”
MY page should rank top to this query!
Why doesn't it?
The Emmottiser in action.
Trying not to encourage fruitless arms races
Will help external as well as internal search

Emmottiser: administrator

Emmottiser: content owner
The query “inconsequential studies” does not appear as a phrase:
Anywhere in your web page
In your web page's title
In anchor text referrring to your web page
Your web page is very long (more than 100,000 words).
The query “inconsequential studies” has been submitted 57,307 times but has never resulted in a click on your web page.
Examples of search-unfriendly publishing which might be detected and for which advice might be given.

The accessoriser?
Bulk WCAG2 compliance testing and reporting over time can be built into your search tool. (within limits)
Accessible web publishing means that ALL students and staff (and other potential stakeholders) can make use of web resources.
In Australian government accessible websites have become mandatory.

Search profiles
Prospective student
Current student
Staff member
… .

Conclusions
A successful search deployment in a university should consider:
Search's potential contribution to the business bottom line
Effective search's contribution to image and marketing
Several business-critical audiences
The symbiotic relationship between publishing and search.
How to achieve high quality ranking in the heterogeneous, somewhat anarchic world of typical university web domains.
Responsive search of restricted-access documents
Specialised resources – LMS, video lectures, expertise, research outputs
Effective search can make HE institutions more attractive, successful and productive

For best results:
For best results:
the right ingredients
proven methods
a dash of expertise
tasty presentation

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Search Engines in the fight against Institutional Impecuniousness

by IWMW on Jul 25, 2011

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