Most organizations that use MOSS make use of SharePoint search in one form or another, but I’ve seen few that really get their dollar’s worth out of SharePoint’s search capability. The most common configuration that I’ve personally observed is the one that SharePoint configures automatically: all SharePoint sites are included in a single content source, and some kind of straightforward indexing schedule gets applied to make it “just work.”
And it does “just work.” The out-of-the-box relevancy engine is pretty good.
But it can be much, much better. Enter the role of the business search administrator. Burt touched on this idea in his blog a few weeks ago, and I’d like to expound a little.
First, I say business search administrator because I think many organizations think of search administration as a primarily technical role and approach it as such from a staffing perspective. (There is certainly a technical component to administering SharePoint’s search, but that’s not the subject of this particular post.) Because of the divide between business and IT in many companies, this means that search may be measured based on availability, its impact on system resources, and breadth of content sources rather than by the relevance of its results or its value to business users.
Here are some ways I think a business search administrator (BSA) can help increase the value that an organization gets out of SharePoint search.
- Understand search. Maybe this one’s obvious, but the BSA needs to know something about how search works. They don’t need to know all the technical details, but a working understanding of content sources, scopes, crawl rules and schedules, and the basics of how SharePoint’s search relevancy works are good starting points.
- Authoritative pages and demoted sites. Once the BSA understands some of how SharePoint calculates search relevance, he or she can start adding authoritative pages and demoted sites. Each search result is given a rank at index time based on its “click distance” from an authoritative page. The demoted site list (called non-authoritative pages in the administration pages) allows the BSA to manually decrease the relevance of specific content.
- Managed properties. Creating a managed property in search enables a number of additional capabilities beyond the standard full text indexing (including property-based advanced searches). But even without leveraging those additional features, managed properties are considered more relevant than unmanaged ones by SharePoint’s relevancy calculation. For example, if you associate documents with vendors and capture the vendor name in a piece of metadata, you can make that a managed property such that when you search on the vendor name, the relevance of those documents with that vendor’s name associated will be higher.
- Scope definitions. Search scopes allow different views on the SharePoint search index based on specific inclusion and exclusion rules. For example, you can create a scope that restricts results for a search only to certain financial documents (based on your own criteria). When a user is looking for a specific financial document and searches using that scope, he or she won’t have to dig through extraneous documents from HR looking for the right file. Determination of what scopes should be created and the rules that define those scopes is a critical differentiator between a run-of-the-mill search implementation and an excellent one.
- Thesaurus and noise word maintenance. SharePoint ships with a standard thesaurus and noise word file: it knows the basics of the language and does an adequate job of equating similar concepts and filtering out common or less meaningful words. What it doesn’t know is the details of your business. There’s no way for SharePoint to know that what you refer to as “WCI” is really the same as “Widget Capacity Index,” and that “widget” is what you call it now, but last year you called it a “whutsit.” And then there’s noise: if all your documents have your company name in them, maybe that’s really just “noise” when it comes to search.
- Keywords/best bets. While keywords don’t impact the relevancy of the search ranking itself (see note in Brian Wilson’s blog), they do affect user perception of the relevance and freshness of the search results. In addition, while many of the settings mentioned here are common to the SharePoint farm or SSP, keywords are stored at a site collection level. This means that the keywords and best bets can be different by site collection and can return information targeted by the business purpose of each site collection. For example, you might specify a different best bet when someone searches on the words “group policy” in your HR site collection than when they search within your IT site collection.
- Search usage analysis. Finally, search can improve with age – in fact, it can improve a lot if there’s an administrator paying close attention to the search usage information that SharePoint provides. What terms are users using to search? And what are they expecting to find when they search on those terms? What queries are not bringing back any results at all? What scopes are users using and not using? Armed with this information, the BSA can make calculated changes to authoritative pages, managed properties, thesaurus, keywords, etc. to improve the search experience. Careful usage analysis is the most critical ongoing responsibility of the BSA role.
So to the original point: why make this a business role? Because it’s likely that someone in the business knows best when content is stale or irrelevant and should be demoted. Someone in the business is often best suited to know which page(s) link to the most relevant and timely content and should be listed as authoritative. Someone in the business best knows the way users think about information and the scopes that would support that thinking. Someone in the business understands the relevant keywords, their synonyms, and the page or site to which users should be directed when search for specific items. There’s technical competence required, but to my eye, it’s a business-focused job.
See if you can take your own search installation to the next level. Try implementing this role and see how the value of your investment in SharePoint search grows over time.
