January 2011

Best Bets in SharePoint

SharePoint search allows you to create Best Bets. They can be created by the Site Collection administrator.

If you go to Site Settings, you should see ‘Search Keywords’ under the Site Collection Administration heading.  If you don’t see it you probably haven’t got the right permissions.

You create a keyword, associate some synonyms with it and then add one or more Best Bet links. You can set it to expire and/or be reviewed.

Keyword: The search term that will generate the Best Bets and also is displayed above the Best Bet e.g. PenFriend

Synonym: Other search terms that will also generate the Best Bet. These aren’t displayed e.g. Pen Friend

Best Bets: The editorially picked search result e.g. Penfriend Audio Labeller

I can’t for the life of me figure out how to delete a keyword (Best Bet, yes. Keyword, no). Maybe it’s a permission thing again.

search
sharepoint

Comments (0)

Permalink

e-commerce: google keywords

This article is part of a series about our e-commerce redesign.

Analysing your search referrals only tells you about the traffic you were successful in attracting. Even if you are getting lots of traffic for a particular keyword that might be a tiny fraction of the number of people searching for that keyword. And the referrers says nothing about what you missed out on completely.

So it helps to look at search engine traffic for keywords in the kind of space your website sits in. The free tools like Google AdWords keyword tool have generated lots of debate about how useful they are but I tend to see them as worth a look if you’re just looking for rough ideas about language and relative popularity.

With our shop research, I didn’t get much data for easy to see, easy to read, giant print, big print, canes, liquid level indicators, and (my favourite) bumpons. I couldn’t find information about Moon (the alphabet) because it was drowned by references to the satellite and all the other things called moon.

What I’ve learnt:

Generally people refer to concrete properties of the product rather than their condition. So it is ‘big button phone’ rather than ‘easy to see phone’ or ‘low vision phone’.

Singular is much more important than plural for objects like clocks and watches but the opposite is true for book formats e.g large print books. Which is kind of obvious…you only want one watch but you may want many books. This might have a bit of effect on our labelling policy, but not much as Google doesn’t seem to make a huge deal about singular verus plural.

There’s clearly a big opportunity around low vision products. The interest in products for blind people (like Braille) is less significant, which makes perfect sense when you compare the size of the audiences.

And loads of people are interested in magnifiers.

analytics
e-commerce
search

Comments (0)

Permalink

SharePoint search administration via SSP

SharePoint search features are managed at 3 levels

  1. Farm level (configure the search service, configure crawler timeout settings etc…)
  2. SSP (Shared Services Provider) level
  3. Site collection level

The SSP functions are accessed via the Shared Services Administration.

SSP search functions:

  • add sources to the crawl
  • block URLs and URL patterns from the crawl
  • define crawl schedules
  • inspect crawl logs and troubleshoot crawls
  • emergency removal of items
  • install IFilters to support non-default file types
  • add/remove file types from the crawl
  • specify authoritative pages
  • create scopes for all site collections (you can also create at a site collection level)

And in theory specify noise words and create a custom thesaurus.  See Inside the Index and Search Engines
chapter 5 for more.

You can by default index these types of content source:

  • SharePoint sites
  • Non-SharePoint websites
  • Windows file shares
  • Microsoft Exchange Server public folders (you can index exchange mailboxes with a 3rd party add-on)

Crawl management:

  • Full crawl: indexes all content
  • Incremental crawl: only accesses content that has been updated since last crawl. Faster, but slow if  accessing an external website
  • Crawl schedules can be specified for each content source
  • Crawls should be scheduled for low usage times

Crawl rules

  • content can be excluded by defining a rule
  • rules are applied in the specified order so you usually need to move exclude rules in front of include rules.
  • a URL can be excluded by adding it as an exclude rule
  • URL patterns can also be excluded and help keep the management of rules neat e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/* or http://www.amazon.co.uk/*/dp/*
  • Exclude rules will remove any matched URLs during the next crawl
  • If you need to remove a URL in an emergency you do this via “Search Result Removal” instead

Resources elsewhere:
Introduction to SharePoint Search Indexes for DPM Administrators
Enterprise Search administration

search
sharepoint

Comments (0)

Permalink