Google Search Appliance Creating the Search Experience - Manual (Page 35)

Google Search Appliance: Creating the Search Experience Best Practices 35
Gathering Information about the Search
Experience
Before you can effectively personalize the search experience, you need to have knowledge about
your end users, such as their roles, functional groups, locations, what they are searching for, and
whether they are finding it or not. The Google Search Appliance enables you to gather information
about user clicks. From this information, you can gain knowledge about end users and their interactions
with search results. Information about user clicks can tell you:
• If users a finding what they're searching for
• If groups of users are searching for the same information
• If certain URLs are harder for users to find than others
By analyzing user clicks, you can identify ways to personalize and improve the search experience. For
example, suppose information about user clicks shows that a users in range of IP addresses are all
searching for information about project Malta. None of the users are finding a satisfactory URL at the
top of the search results. Some of the users are finding a satisfactory URL on page 3 of the results.
However, many users are abandoning the search after viewing page 2 of the results.
The range of IP addresses tells you that the users who are searching for the results are all Engineers in
the U.S. who are working on project Malta. You might create a front end for this group of users. For
information about this task, refer to “Creating a Front End” on page 90.
For this front end, you might promote project Malta URLs to the top of the search results using
KeyMatches (see “Using KeyMatches to Guide Users to URLs” on page 41). Another alternative for
promoting these URLs is to use source biasing (see “Using Source Biasing” on page 70) to move the
result up in the listings.
Some time after you deploy the front end for Engineers in the U.S., you can gather more information
about user clicks to find out if the personalization that you deployed in the front end is successfully
improving the search experience. You can also use this information to make other changes to improve
and personalize the search experience.
Viewing Detailed Data about User Clicks
The Google Search Appliance feature that enables you to gather information about user clicks is
advanced search reporting (ASR). When advanced search reporting is enabled in the Admin Console (see
“Enabling Advanced Search Reporting for a Front End” on page 40), you can export an advanced search
report (see “Exporting an Advanced Search Report” on page 40). Each entry in an advanced search
report represents a single user click or other action, such as page load, in the search appliance user
interface.
When you enable advanced search reporting, the search appliance uses its automatic-self learning
scorer (see “Using the Automatic Self-Learning Scorer” on page 41), which fine tunes relevance and
scoring for results.