Google Search Appliance Creating the Search Experience - Manual (Page 33)

Google Search Appliance: Creating the Search Experience Best Practices 33
Personalizing the Search Experience
The Google Search Appliance enables you to personalize the search experience. Rather than providing
one centralized search experience for everyone, you can provide different search experiences for
different groups of users. Each personalized search experience is based on the interests, roles,
departments, locations, or languages of the user group.
For example, suppose your Google Search Appliance provides search for internal users from different
organizations. Users often search for “acme widgets,” but they are not all searching for the same results.
More typically, when searching for acme widgets:
• Engineering staff is searching for design documents and status information
• Sales staff is searching for sales forecasts and reports
• Customer support is searching for support metrics and update information
With a centralized search experience, some users may find what they are looking for at the top of the
results listings while other users might have to view several results before finding what they are looking
for. With a personalized search experience:
• Each group of users has a unique search experience where results are ranked according to their
interests
• Users find what they are looking for at the top of the search results
Users do not need to take any action to have a personalized search experience. The search appliance
automatically presents a personalized search experience based on changes that you, as the system
administrator, have implemented using search appliance features, including front ends (see “The
Relationship Between the Search Experience and Front Ends” on page 34), KeyMatches (see “Using
KeyMatches to Guide Users to URLs” on page 41), and source biasing (see “Using Source Biasing” on
page 70).
The first step to personalizing the search experience is gathering information about the search
experience (see “Gathering Information about the Search Experience” on page 35) as it is currently
deployed on the Google Search Appliance. After gathering this information, you can analyze it and
decide:
• Who needs a personalized search experience
• How to personalize the search experience for each target group
• Which search appliance features you should use to create personalized search experiences
Enable users to add search results
for certain keywords in a specific
front end User results “Providing User Results” on page 75
Allow users to give you feedback User interface “Adding a Feedback Mechanism for
Users” on page 85
Optimize the response time of
results Various features “Optimizing the Speed of Results”
on page 80
Remove obsolete or non-essential
content from the search index Whitelist URLs or
Blacklist URLs “Keeping the Search Index Clean” on
page 82
Best Practice Feature or Resource to Use Reference