Google Search Appliance User Experience Guide August 2014 © 2014 Google 1
User Experience Guide This paper is a guide to creating the Google Search Appliance user experience. The success of your deployment depends not only on the breadth and depth of search, but also on how satisfying and effective the search experience is for users. The aim of this guide is to share the many things you can do to drive user satisfaction and increase use of the search solution.
Contents About this document Chapter 1 Presentation Methods Overview Google Search Appliance presentation layer Application presentation layer Chapter 2 Understanding and Using Front Ends Overview Presentation/look and feel Content filtering and enrichment Review: Which presentation method should you use? proxystylesheet versus client parameters Chapter 3 Using Enrichment Features Overview Feature list Key considerations Chapter 4 Using Collections and Front Ends to Manage the User Experience Overview Decid
Chapter 1 Presentation Methods Overview Sending a search query to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) returns results in raw XML. To make this XML presentable to the end user, the GSA parses the XML, along with an XSLT stylesheet, and this generates an HTML web page. One of the first decisions to be made when deciding upon the user experience is which presentation method to use. By presentation method, we mean the platform on which the search interface is presented to the users.
Limitations and Disadvantages However, there are some limitations to using the GSA presentation layer: most notably that highly sophisticated, interactive, or JavaScript-rich user interfaces are more challenging to deliver. This is primarily due to the declarative nature of XSLT and security restrictions that prevent uploading of content to the search appliance. Using the GSA presentation layer has the following disadvantages: ● Not advisable for a highly sophisticated user experience.
● Security can be managed at the application level by allowing the application to determine the collections and front ends a user is able to see. ● Look and feel can be maintained within host site templates. Disadvantages However, using the application presentation layer has the following disadvantages: ● The deployment architecture is more complicated because of the additional hardware required.
Chapter 2 Understanding and Using Front Ends Overview The Google Search Appliance feature that enables you to create different search experiences for users is the front end. A front end is a framework that manages most of the elements of a single search experience.
The client query parameter controls which front end is used in serving search results. The following table provides details about client. Parameter Possible Value Description client omitted Required parameter. If this parameter does not have a valid value, other parameters in the query string do not work as expected.
proxystylesheet versus client parameters The following diagram shows the factors that each parameter controls. For more information about front ends, see Creating the Search Experience.
Chapter 3 Using Enrichment Features Overview Several Google Search Appliance enrichment features enable you to customize search results and enhance the user experience. By using these features, you can ensure that users get search results that are appropriate to their interests, roles, departments, locations, languages, or other characteristics. It is advisable to conduct a workshop to test and investigate these features and establish their suitability for the end users.
results cause designated documents to always appear on the results pages for specific keyword searches. From version 7.0, User Results replaces UAR (User-added results). Alerts Alerts allow users to monitor topics of interest by receiving search results for these topics in email messages. These can be setup as hourly, daily, or weekly. Please note alerts will only work for public data; secure content is not returned in alerts.
Snippet generation: A snippet is a small section of text in a search result. In some cases, you might see search results where snippets have not been generated for some documents. Use snippet generation to restore missing snippets for these documents. You can also edit the length of the search result snippets here. Link Results: Allows administrators to configure the number of returned results when using a “link” query. The query prefix link: lists web pages that have links to the specified web page.
collection that contains only profile information. Data sources for this collection can include Microsoft SharePoint, LDAP, or any other profile content with metadata that can be crawled or fed into the search index. From version 7.0, Expert Search replaces People Search. Google Apps results (sidebar element) Google Apps provide your organization with tools for collaborating on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, sites, and more.
Key considerations When planning your user experience, it is important to note which features will work in combination together and which features will not. In addition, certain features are only available while searching public content and certain features require your users to provide credentials. The following table lists the caveats of some of the enrichment features described in this chapter. Feature Caveat Dynamic navigation ● Works for secure searches as of release 6.
● Does not work when dynamic navigation is enabled in GSA default front ends. Customization is required to work together. Advise against using these features together particularly for secure search due to increased load on GSA. ● Must be displayed on top to work with sidebar elements via Page Layout Helper. ● Can impact performance particularly for secure search. Alerts ● ● ● Does not work with secure content. Cannot edit the alerts management page. Requires LDAP integration.
Chapter 4 Using Collections and Front Ends to Manage the User Experience Overview Collections are used to create logical groupings of content within the index. A document can appear in as many collections as needed, and collections can include all documents, or be as narrow as a single document. You can enable users to search all collections or restrict them to a specific one.
Chapter 5 Public versus Secure Search User Experience Overview The search experience can vary greatly depending on how the search results are being served. Understanding differences between viewing public search results versus viewing secure search results is essential for planning your search experience. There are certain limitations to the features that can be used when performing secure search, and the user experience is different in several key ways which are described in this chapter.
Parameter Value Description access s Search only secure content a Search all content, both public and secure The following example shows a search request with access=s.
Dynamic navigation We verify 30K documents for public searches (for the purpose of creating the facets) Works for secure searches as of release 6.12; does not work for secure searches in 6.10 and previous releases. Recommended only for secure search when using ACLs for Authorization. We verify 10K documents for secure searches (for the purpose of creating the facets). If there is a high number of concurrent requests this might have a negative impact on system performance.
Chapter 6 Using Reports to Enhance the User Experience Overview You can significantly improve the ROI (Return On Investment) of your search deployment by spending a little time examining what your users are doing with the search appliance and what kind of search experience they are having. By examining this information, you can: ● Understand the business value and criticality of your search application.
Report type Description Search Report The search report contains the following information: ● ● ● The number of searches per day The average number of searches per hour The top 100 (or whatever specified number) keywords and queries and the number of occurrences of each If you have enabled ASR, then it will also contain the rank of selected results, page of selected results, IP address of most frequent users and most popular URLs based on user clicks.
Search reports Search reports remain available for one year from the creation date. You can create up to 500 reports across all collections. Search logs You cannot generate search log reports for time periods more than 90 days in the past. If you need to analyze log data for longer time periods, generate reports at least once every 90 days, then export and store the reports. You can then analyze the aggregated reports, which were collected over longer time periods.
Based on these observations, there are two immediate actions that you might take to increase user effectiveness: ● Activate query expansion (Off by default) and upload your own synonyms list, including an expansion that equates widget and gadget, so that a search for “widget” automatically becomes a search for “gadget.” As a result of this enhancement, 90% of users running a search for widget or gadget will find search twice as effective.
solution to provide analytical insight into the user search experience. In many cases, integration with a third-party analytical solution requires some effort to get search-specific reporting, but there is substantial value that can be derived from the data. Reporting in multiple GSAs The following sections describe considerations for gathering reporting data from deployments involving multiple GSAs.
Chapter 7 User Feedback Overview Users are conditioned to have a great search experience with continuous innovation on Google.com. By using the search appliance, you can deliver a similarly innovative and rich experience to your users. If the GSA is replacing an existing search solution, a great way for gathering feedback and metrics is by conducting a review of the existing solution for comparison with the GSA solution later.
Search satisfaction survey 1. What is your role? Engineering Finance Human Resources Sales Marketing Research Other 2. What percent of your time is spent looking for information? More than half my time A quarter to half my time 30 minutes to 2 hours per day 10 minutes to 30 minutes per day Less than 10 minutes per day 3. How often does your result show up in the top 10 (first page)? 100% of the time 80% of the time 50% of the time 20% of the time Never 4.
Sufficient Unacceptable 8. Which content sources would you like to see indexed (added to the search results)? _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ 9. Have you ever had documents that you knew existed but couldn't find them with search? Yes No 10.
Summary This guide provides detailed guidance on the factors to consider when creating the user experience with the Google Search Appliance. A user’s search experience and needs on a public website differ vastly from a user’s search behind the firewall. As such, when designing your user experience, it is important to keep the end user in the foremost of your mind.
Appendix More Information Technical solutions for common challenges This appendix presents some technical solutions for common challenges in the following areas of search appliance deployment. ● ● Interfaces and Front End Customization Document Relevancy Interfaces and Front End Customization I just changed my front end but when I view my results, they still show the old one. What is wrong? ● A front end will only reload itself into memory every 15 minutes (or even longer).
How can I see the XML that the Google Search Appliance is sending back before it gets transformed? ● For results, remove the proxystylesheet parameter and value. For example: ○ ● http://GSA_HOSTNAME/search? q=query&btnG=Google+Search&access=p&client=default_frontend&outpu t= xml_no_dtd&sort=date:D:L:d1&entqr=0&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF8&ud=1&site=default_collection For dynamic results clustering, you can directly query the Google Search Appliance for the XML output.
How can I increase the relevancy, in the search results, of more recent documents? ● Create a result biasing policy, which increases the relevancy of documents based upon the date that they were last modified. Then, attach this policy to the appropriate front end. ● For URLs which have been added via a content feed you can add the following attribute to the feed: pagerank ○ ● This attribute specifies the PageRank of the URL or group of URLs. The default value is 96.
