Tips for Fixing a ‘Broken’ Search Engine

You’ve gotten your team to accept the intranet, log in every once in awhile, but they think it sucks!

What next? How do you regain their loyalty to intranet usage? The truth is, it is not the intranet that is at fault; users are to blame. Users expect intranet search tools to work like magic, type one word, enter, and yes! All the info they need is readily available.

Users also expect to find all their work solutions on a single click. Though this expectation is somewhat overrated, this is one way of ensuring they also deliver as you expect. This article seeks to answer the ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ of intranet search challenges.

Tagging & Document Versioning

Firstly, we need to agree that search depends on more than just technology. The idea that you only need to install it and go your way is misguided. There’s a lot of work to it; you definitely need to set up a team if you haven’t already. Version documents and tag them so that they can easily be retrieved from the database.

Carry Out Polls and Surveys

The next item on the list should be to get search statistics.  Polls and surveys will help you understand which part of the search engine needs to be configured for better results. Intranet search tools for corporates will only be helpful if they are set up with these questions in mind:

• What are employees searching for?
• Which results do they pick?
• Are there queries that get wrong answers?

One challenge with intranet search for employees is that the queries sometimes need to be precise. They also must be extremely accurate. The use of search filters can help employees sort out specific data sets from the junk in the database.

Indexing

Before you even think of indexing, make sure the content is accurate, it’s clear and comprehensive. It needs to have well-written H1 headings too. We can’t emphasize enough the need to maintain effective information that meets the ever-changing employees’ priorities and demands.

Let’s go back to indexing, search engines for intranets differ from regular engines in that rankings and search results need to be customized to meet the dynamic employee demands. You need to apply manual keywords, rules, and processes.

This is how to do it:

• Ensure your team maintains effective technological support. That is, content management and search.
• Get employees to participate; have them actively share information for the content to be up to date.
• Apply Meta tags; add keywords as Meta tags within content pages.

If you have done this, you are well on your way towards success.

Fixing the search engine for your intranet is not a one-off affair. It requires consistency in fine-tuning search, content, and user interaction. Top intranet vendors like LS intranet provides intranet SaaS solutions that have well-structured in-built search engines. Our developers can help customize your portal to suit search queries from your intranet users. Call us or emails for inquiries. Meanwhile, look around and see our intranet suite products.

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