The purpose of our site search is to assist visitors acquire the knowledge they need as efficiently as possible. Unlike internet search engines, we only have to serve results for our 'family' of sites. However, with more than 150,000 pages, this is still a complicated task, made even more challenging by the distributed authorship model that we live with and the disparate content sources (i.e. differing quality and completeness of metadata). In order to do search better I believe that we should we should focus our efforts in four main areas:
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- Search loads quickly, tested with Google Pagespeed Insights, with a minimum of 80/100.
- The response time of a query should be about 0.1 seconds, but never longer than 1 second, measured at the user interface.
- Search will be available 24/7 (around the clock seven days a week). Monitored by, for instance, Pingdom or Uptimerobot.
- Size of search indexes. Among other things, to see if more or fewer documents are indexed, which can provide warning signs in advance, help being proactive.
- Search’s user interfaces are accessible, tested with the W3C Validator.
- Search’s user interfaces are usable, tested against webbriktlinjer.seand W3C:s WCAG 2.0 at level AA.
- Survey the satisfaction of users.
- Reviewing search statistics and/or performing search analytics, to gain insight into how users are searching. Look regularly at our:
- Top Xx queries: To gain an insight into how the experience of search is for a large part of the users. And also, if the relevance model can be improved and what content is most in demand.
- Abandoned queries:
- Zero result queries: To identify what content is missing, find synonyms to use, understand which abbreviations are used and discover alternative spellings.
Training
Probably everyone who use search are in need of some form of training in the offered features. At least the following user training needs to be actively disseminated and be available when needed:
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