January 2006 - Smartsearch - Search and Deliver

(The original article from which this excerpt was taken can be found in the January/February issue of eContent magazine. For eContent registration and login for online viewing click here.)

Sidebar - Search and Deliver

Companies have a choice: Plug in a typical black box search appliance and leave a site's internal search results to chance, or harness new "intelligent" search technology to analyze visitors' internal site searching patterns and use this insight to provide users specifically relevant search results across all of the company's Web properties on the first click.

Enabling the latter is Northwoods Software Inc., a Wisconsin-based software engineering and Web development company. Its SmartSearch tool streamlines internal search functions, offering customers the means to track search terms and manually assign search results to commonly used search terms. Moreover, SmartSearch automatically captures and tracks search words that site visitors use to query a site and allows companies to map these keywords (and their common misspellings) to hand-picked URLs.

The solution has already been implemented on goMilwaukee (www.milwaukee.gov) a combined county-city portal. "We can understand how people search and we can manually drive traffic to the pages visitors should see," explains Randy Gschwind, City of Milwaukee CIO. The pay off is a "more responsive government and a significant reduction in the number of clicks to get to relevant information."

Northwoods believes that providing companies with insight about and control of the search process allows search to do more than just offer site visitors lists of results. According to Rick Fessenbecker, managing director of Northwoods, "Our customers can guarantee relevant search results and introduce users to new content because they—and not the algorithms—are in complete control." He says, "We provide a peek into the subconscious mind of visitors. When they type the word in the search box, they are telling you exactly what they're looking for. You can then see if the search results are coming up with the relevant information and fine-tune them to be sure you're delivering the relevant content." Everything else is guesswork.

From: eContent Magazine – January/February issue – written by: Peggy Anne Salz