Qweery's look at the world of search

The discussion on wether or not to automatically alter the users search query to one the search engine thinks is correct is subject of a new discussion now that Google seems to be doing this with their “Did you mean” function.

What happens? If you type a query for which Google finds a suggestion, it now shows 2 results for the suggested query at the top of the search results. Below you’ll find the results for the query entered by the user.

Automated correction results by Google

How thoughtfull? I think not, not for a public search engine anyway.

What makes the function ‘Did you mean…’ tick? Well, most probable both present worddata found in all documents indexed by Google and user input combined. Every query is checked with known words and a most common query is build from popular searches similar to the one checked and with more possible results.
Since Google has no limited information domain (it indexes all info found in the world) a particular search, like the one shown in the image above, cannot easily be translated to the one suggested. The subjects are totaly different, only the letter combination is one letter off.

When is it possible to do an automated replacement? Within a website for instance. The information domain on a website is limited and a suggestion comes from information of that website (so don’t use the common API from Google ) and would probably be sensable.

Preferably the user is given an option to save his or hers preffered setting for a next time. An advise to Google: add this as an option to the user preferences!

Is an internal search engine the same as web self-service or can/must they co-exist? I believe they, if both implemented correctly, must co-exist. I’ll try and explain why.

First, what is my definition of internal search and web self-service.
An internal search engine works like Google and shows all pages which contain the search terms, ranked by a certain mechanism designed for the specific type of pages.
Web self-service is related to customer service and answers customer questions automatically without direct contact between the customer/visitor and the contact center of a company. With web self-service a customer can enter his/her question in normal sentences or a keyword like manner. Some kind of language processing is used for query formatting.

Both functions use technical concepts of information retrieval, spelling correction and synonyms, stemming and other word functions, which can make them a bit alike. An internal search engine can be used to act like a web self-service engine and the other way around, but I wouldn’t recommend this. Now my arguments why:

What happens when you use an interal search engine for web self-service? No language processing (NLP), limited control on which answer is given with which question, no content management but only crawling for content (possibly with a direct database connection). All typical search engine lacks for web self-service.

And what for a web self-service engine as internal search engine? Website page are not suited for answering questions only for additional or background information. Users expect a keyword search mechanism which lowers the language processing power for relevancy. Language processing lowers search speed for large collections. Manual control for large collections becomes a full-time day (a night) job.

Web self-service engines function best with 250-1000 answers to about 5000 questions users may ask within one organisation.
Internal search engines function best with >250 collections of webpages which can be similar in content.

Web self-service engines should be presented in a separate customer service environment on a website and only present specific answer to specific questions. If there is not answer present, it could redirect to a internal search engine, but only if the users tells it to do so. This increases the reporting power of the self-service tool immensly. The self-service tooling can/must also be used at any webform used on the website, like checkout pages to enable the user to ask proces related questions without leaving the proces it self.

The internal search engine should not index the self-service answers and suggest the use of the tool at the customer service pages and a search box should be placed on all webpages at the top right corner. Use the search engine for product search for instance, increases the controlling power of the administrator and with the right search engine also the conversion for the products in a webshop.

Correctly implemented internal search and web self-service complete each other and make the website stronger and more usable for both visitor as administrator.