The document discusses the challenges of providing an effective enterprise search service for the University of Edinburgh. It outlines an ambitious program with limited resources to categorize, relate, and return all university content to guide audiences. A roadmap is proposed to improve facets, external results, reach, groupings, and data sources. The goal is to empower the web community and provide devolved administration, SEO training, and enhance speed and user interaction through rich results, autocomplete, and improved pages. A search audit and analytics are recommended to measure performance and identify issues to inform the search future of training editors and understanding challenges.

1. Editorial Development Officer, The University of Edinburgh
How to make stakeholders care about search
Duncan MacGruer

2. University search vision & strategy
● “10 blue lines” thinking
○ Buy-in for enterprise search thinking in pockets
● Ambitious programme of work
○ Limited resources and budget allocation
● Complex website & applications estate
○ poor/inconsistent data quality

3. The University of
Edinburgh Challenge
To provide a search service that can reach,
categorise, relate and return all of the content,
information and data required to guide the
University audiences to fulfil their tasks as quickly
and as efficiently as possible.

4. Roadmap
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery/developing-a-
roadmap
Business Objective Product Area/feature
Categorising and relating results Faceted Search results
Return results from external sources (social media)
Widening reach of search Secured results
Search results based on groupings (student, UG, psychology)
Display data from non-website sources (books, in IS)
Populating pages using results feeds
Feeding results using API
Empowering the University web community to best
provide content, information and data
Devolved admin for local control
Design and deliver SEO training to community
Enhancing the speed and efficiency of user interaction Rich event results
Rich video results
Homepage result show branding/logo
Improve “no results” page
Implement multi-channel autocomplete
Improve mixed meta description/snippet

5. https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool

6. Search audit
● Standard for measurement of
good or bad performance
● Evidence for searches that don’t
perform
● Search analytics for your site – Rosenfeld (2011)

7. Search future
● Community of editors
○ “SEO” training
○ Working with our Squiz partners to understand where
our challenges meet search possibilities
● https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/tag/search