Intelligent Search Brings Public Knowledge To The Fore

CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND (October, 2003) - A little search box carries a lot of responsibility when more than half your Web site's 60,000 visitors per month rely on search to find information.

When you are Statistics New Zealand, and one of your main aims is to provide as many New Zealanders with as much information as possible, effective search is essential. Statistics chose search technology from Christchurch company SLI Systems as the most intelligent option for bringing official information closer to New Zealanders' fingertips.

Statistics' website, www.statistics.govt.nz, is a crucial information delivery mechanism. The site contains more than 50,000 pages and receives on average 60,000 unique visitors and more than a million page views per month. These include Statistics' own information centre staff, whose job is to help enquirers find information on a one-to-one basis.

In 2001, Statistics embarked on a major Web site revamp. It became clear that the incumbent search facility did not have the horsepower to handle the myriad of enquiries the site would process. It did not effectively rank results or allow for misspellings, synonyms, or guesses at search terms taken by visitors confused by statistical terms.

Finding it faster

Project Manager Gareth McGuinness says the Web team's objectives were based on visitors finding information faster. This included many of Statistics' information centre staff, who were so frustrated by the slow and ineffective incumbent search technology that they used slow and inefficient navigation instead.

• The Web team's criteria for the selection of the successful search technology were:
• The most useful results rank most highly
• The descriptions give a good indication of the content of the page
• Wording in the search results description is easy to understand
• It strips out completely irrelevant results
• It lists the total number of results from each search

The Web team used the popular search engine Google as their benchmark.

After evaluating a range of options, Statistics chose SLI Systems' Learning Search. This fast search learns from the search behaviour of visitors, promoting pages that prove to be popular and presenting search suggestions to users based on what others have found useful.

Learning Search includes analytical tools that provide Web masters and marketing staff with useful search behaviour information such as what keywords and phrases visitors are using, and what keywords are yielding poor results. This provides staff the ability to alter site content so that the search yields more fruitful results for visitors.

Web staff can also manually promote the rank of particular pages, such as those that best answer frequently searched topics.

Immediate improvement

As soon as the SLI Systems search was implemented in July 2003, search performance improved dramatically. In the first month that SLI Systems' search was installed on the Statistics site, 60,000 unique visitors performed 66,000 searches. "We can tell from the reports from SLI Systems that the vast majority were finding something useful, " says Gareth McGuinness.

For instance, the average rank of the results selected by visitors after a search improved from the 14th ranked result (ie, they were on the second page of results before finding a result relevant enough to click) to the fourth. Another positive indicator is that information centre staff are again using search as a matter of course.

Because the technology also reports on terms that have yielded poor results, Statistics can now improve the content of the site so it delivers visitors more satisfying answers. For instance, if they are searching on information not held on the site, a link can be provided to where it can be found.

Gareth McGuinness says that Statistics has changed some content on the site since learning about its visitors' search behaviour from Learning Search. This information will also influence the team's forthcoming purge of jargon, which should make all content more user-friendly.

SLI Systems' Learning Search benefits have outweighed the cost of investment because search performance - and therefore the ability to access public knowledge - has improved, he says.

And those 30,000 visitors per month previously frustrated in their search attempts will be thanking Statistics for putting the information they need closer to their fingertips.

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