Searching...: a blog about search and the sun search team

Noticed anything different?

Thanks to all of your feedback we have taken the next step and replaced our old search templates with our new and improved design.  We were very please to hear so many positive things about this design.  This is just a small step in a continual move forward with more features and enhancements.  We've been really busy with some backend infrastructure work that should be completed soon.  Once it is, you should see some even better results.  We can't wait for you to see but we're not quite there yet.

In the meantime, if there are things you would like to see added or changed to our current design -- please let us know.  Comment below.

It's been a while since we've written but we wanted to give you an update on what we've been up to.  First off we want to thank all of you who have been giving us feedback on our new search design.  We were very pleased that the majority of feedback was very positive.   We did make some adjustments to our design based on your comments.  Some examples of those updates are:

• We changed how you get to the advanced search options.  Now, you just click on "More Options" to get to these controls.
• You now can see that you have additional options enabled right within your search results.
• You can reset to the default options or change your selections with easy links within the results as well.
  

We will be rolling this out as Sun's default search soon -- stay tuned!

If you want to get a more detailed look into our beta and new features, check out this video!

Sun Search Beta - The Basics from Search Videos on Vimeo.

Of course, we still have a long way to go and would love to hear your thoughts on what else you'd like to see.

We've been listening... did we get it right?
We've definitely heard you -- search is important and you want it to work better. So here it is, the new beta search.  The top things that we've heard from you are:

• Make it easy to find what I want.
• I want more content included from all of the related Sun sites.
• Help! Why do you include so much content in the search results?
• I want to be able to slice and dice my results.
• Where and what is advanced search?
• How can I get a better sense of what content that is available?
  

Of course there's more and as you can even tell from the list above, not everyone agrees on what they want.  The message that we received loud and clear is that you just want to find what you are looking for, every time you search.   That's a tall order but we believe that we are heading in that direction with our newly revised search, now in beta and ready for you to test.

What you will see...now
We really focused on these key areas with this beta:

1. Improved clustering:  We're getting rid of the tabbed filtered navigation to a more intuitive left nav system -- complete with a breakdown of results by area.
2. Improved user controls:   We're integrating the advanced search features directly into the interface and giving you choices on what to include and exclude in the results.
3. Improved integration of community content:  Couldn't find the community content you are looking for on our live search?  We don't always make it easy but we believe that this is a big step in the right direction towards that goal.

...and in the future
This is the first release of our new search platform prototype.  Is it perfect?  Absolutely not!  Is it everything we want it to be?  No, but it's a start.  We will be listening for your feedback and making changes based on what you tell us.  In addition, we will be continuing to focus on things like the improvement of suggested searches and the contextual quality of the results.

We're very excited about this and will be posting our findings here on a regular basis so check back here to see what else we've learned and where that's driving us.

Please, most importantly, we can't do this alone.   We need to hear your feedback.  So please, test out our new beta search and use the [+]  feedback button found on the lower right of each page to let us know what you think. Don't be afraid to give us your thoughts and suggestions.

Apparently not, said our customers in a recent study performed by allowing them to choose their tool side-by-side. For several weeks users were given the choice throughout the sun.com site to perform their searches using either Sun or Google search tools via a simple pop-up widget. About one in twenty users were randomly asked why they chose the tool they did and about their satisfaction with the results. Users told us that when they are on Sun sites they believe the Sun tools would provide better search results because Sun knows their own stuff better than could Google - and the users confirmed that message with their behavior by choosing Sun over Google eight to one. User satisfaction supports the story of Sun's good strength as a search tool in that for both tools the success rate for getting what the user needed was about 73%, and the overall user satisfaction score averages were 3.4 for Sun and 3.3 for Google, on a 5-point scale. Relevant, useful results and a clean layout - Sun gets user kudos for search.

I've been working with the Sun search team for about six years now. When we started the user cry was "make it like Google". Three or four years ago the general comment became "good as Google". Perhaps now we're moving to a place where we'll hear that Sun's search tool is "better than Google".
Of course, even that's not good enough for us, so look for Sun's new search beta coming soon!

For the Sun search team,
Ben

Perhaps, most of you knew this but I did not truly understand the google toolbar PageRank feature until recently. I was reading a book a co-worker of mine recommended called Search Engine Marketing, Inc. Driving Search Traffic To Your Company's Web Site, and within its pages all was revealed. Well, at least regarding this particular question.

 The page rank feature is a little icon that displays in the google toolbar; it looks like this:

Do you notice the PageRanking for this page http://www.sun.com/service  is 8/10? Well, I thought that meant it was the 8th rank out of 10 on this first search results page. Doh!!! What does it really mean? Here is a quote from the book I mentioned above:

"The PageRank bar reveals a number between zero (meaning the page has not been indexed) and ten (you really can't get any better) that shows Google's perceived importance of that page.  The toolbar shows the page's PageRank on the PageRank scale, so it will display 10/10 for a page with the highest possible PageRank score. "

So, this page is actually doing quite well with regards to PageRank. Of course, there is more to a successful search strategy for a page than the Google PankRank bar but it certainly is a good start.

So, our group is meeting today to discuss how a select group of pages are doing with regards to search. We came up with a set of reports that will hopefully give us a good idea on how well we are doing the SEO basics and if customers are able to find our pages using specific terms. I don't know that we have (or at least I haven't) ever really analyzed a page's search performance nor had a good idea of terms customers are using and then how successfully we incorporate those terms into our pages. 

There are definitely some gaps in our baseline but it is a start and I think it  has revealed quite a bit about our understanding of how search works. The bigger question is now what? So, we have a baseline of a page's search performance do we narrow our focus to simply analyzing the success of a search query? Or do we expand our thinking and incorporate this search baseline into the larger question, which would be the overall goal of the page? In the latter, you run the risk of boiling the ocean but in the former, your scope may not lend itself to helping a group meet their Web goals. Obviously, we have a few things to talk about today.