This is article I wrote for the Allianz graduate newsletter. I was quite pleased with it so thought it would be a nice thing to add to my Posterous.
As some may have noticed Allianz Intranet’s search facility is now powered by Google and Best in Class talked to Paul Towner to get an insight into the benefits, challenges and technology involved.
Google is undoubtedly the most popular search engine on the Internet and after valuable feedback from the Business Intranet Group, which highlighted the previous search system’s errors it is now available for all Allianz employees. It is currently live on the Retail section of the Intranet if anyone wishes to test it out.
Google indexes all documents on the Intranet, so that with a few keywords finding a needle in a haystack doesn’t seem so difficult. The way in which Google provides results to searches is the query processor. It has several parts, including the search box, the engine that evaluates queries and matches them to relevant documents, and the results themselves. It will be important for everyone to add as many metatags and keywords to their intranet pages as possible to make the querying more efficient. Combine this with fast processors and the results are quick and useful. The busy Googlebots will be trawling their way through the Intranet and will try and pick up as many keywords as possible using query words such as URL’s and titles, etc.
One of the benefits of having Google on the Intranet is that it is extremely similar to searching on the Internet so the familiar tools such as advanced and quick search are readily available (Check out BIC’s Tips for some useful search terms!) Also, Google is so widely used almost everyone will be familiar with its interface. The system is already growing in size and thanks to our busy developers telling it where to crawl for information, there are over 20,000 pages fully indexed. It is hoped that by later this summer even more will be and the search facility will be accessible via the homepage.
Another huge benefit is the Google console allows us to run reports which show us the most popular searched phrases. This will enable us to see areas in which we need to improve the general intranet navigation and also see what information everyone is pursuing.
The biggest challenge which the developers have come across is that the Allianz Intranet wasn’t built with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in mind. SEO is the process of ranking links in search results so to improve the quality of this it’s strongly encouraged for all publishers of content to complete some housekeeping such as deleting old versions of documents and pages. Paul hopes that working on sponsored links (similar to the Internet version of Google) could be implemented into the Intranet, but that will be for future development.
The addition of Google to the Intranet seems to be welcome and productive and a big thanks to Paul for talking with us. Remember to clean up after yourself and perform housekeeping to keep the searching clean.
Go on, Google yourself on the Intranet!
