Search & Promote the implementation, part 1

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“I can’t find anything!”

This is the most common response we came across during the scoping and implementation of Search and Promote as the new internal search for Murdoch University.

Hardly surprising, given the issues with internal search that I covered in my previous post, but amazingly consistent!

In fact, one of the great truths we found during this project is that people truly don’t care where content is located, or whether it’s authenticated and/or accessible – they just wanted to type something in the search box, immediately find what they’re looking for, then carry on with their work.

We’ve now completed the implementation across our internal sites, and it’s working really well – so well that we’re now 2-3 weeks away from covering our external sites.

In my last post I promised to run through the implementation, however turkmenistan email list 17859 contact leads there’s a lot to talk about, so today I’ll cover SEO metatags (or the lack thereof), using multiple content sources, and how we integrated Search & Promote with SiteCatalyst to dynamically alter search result ranking.

Given the issues with internal search across campus and the wide range of staff and students that were more than happy to tell us just how bad it was, we decided to first implement Search & Promote across the internal sites where our primary audience are current staff and students.

Through the implementation of SiteCatalyst a few years back across our network sites we have been able to segment our staff and student traffic, so we knew from the onset just how many searches each segment were doing, and how long on average they were taking.

Looking specifically at staff, approx 2,400 people collectively performed 234,131 searches in 2010, spending an average of 202 secs per search. Wow!

That equates to 13,137 hours, which, at an average of $40/hr, comes out to a $524,498 productivity cost. This figure alone should catch the attention of your key stakeholders and finance people.

Armed with that knowledge, we set the following key objective for the Search & Promote trial across our internally facing sites;

Reduce time staff spent searching by 10% by delivering a single set of filterable results, transparent of source, influenced by recent traffic.
Now that we had a clear objective, we could begin on the planning and implementation. We were greatly aided by a project team at Search & Promote – thanks John, Wally and Richard; you were all very helpful, and it was great working with each of you.