Search engine logs are a powerful tool for the intranet professional. Statistics may tell us where employees have been, but search logs reveal what they are really looking for and how they do it.

What Employees Look For

A month’s worth of searches within a corporate intranet I manage uncovered a number of popular terms and topics:

• Social club
• Store
• Change telephone message
• Calendar
• Business cards
• Job openings
• Training
• Internal mail
• Employee anniversary gifts
• Corporate paper recycling program
• Fax cover page template
• Internet access form
• Office floor plans
• Photo bank

I also found a number of internal informal acronyms as well as corporate terms for various programs and committees.

Previous user interviews and usability testing have shown that most employees use the search engine as a last resort, when they cannot find what they are looking for through regular navigation. For that reason, search logs are a good indicator of what the intranet is doing wrong.

In this case, of the 14 popular topics:

• 8 were nonexistent on the intranet
• 2 indicated general topics
• 3 were the target of an intended action
• 1 was available on the intranet but under a very different name

How People Search

Plain Language Keywords: Most people don’t make the effort to try to remember how a certain topic is labeled on the intranet; they simply type the words that come to mind naturally.

Spelling mistakes: Mistakes in search terms are very common and have various causes including low literacy, typos or proper names with unfamiliar spellings.

Repeated attempts: Strangely enough, many people that do not get satisfying results on their first attempt try again without changing anything. They don’t get the expected result but don’t trust the search engine. They are assuming that a) the information does exist on the intranet and that b) it is named according to the words they used to search for it.

What Search Engine Logs Tell You

• Information that doesn’t exist on the intranet but should
• Information that does exist but is difficult to find
• Most popular keywords/topics/actions
• Search terms that yielded no results

How You Can Use That Information

Organize information according to popular keywords and topics
If several people each month search for “training”, it may be a good idea to gather all training information on the intranet within a single “theme” page. The fact that people search simply for “training” rather than being more specific tells us that they expect all training information to be grouped together.

Get Buy-in from Managers
Countless intranets suffer because managers do not undertand the value it brings to the organization. Search logs can help by providing hard evidence that people actually spend time searching for something that may not even be on the intranet at all. For example, an Administrative Services manager may be interested to know how many searches are being made for office floor plans, voicemail instructions or internal mail procedures.

Adapt intranet language to users’ language
During my research for this article, I found dozens of requests for “employee anniversary gifts”. That information actually exists on the intranet, but under the name “Awards Recognition Program”. That page is not being found because its title is unclear and not consistent with the words employees use to refer to it. This type of data is useful to promote the importance of plain language content and of optimizing sites for search engines.

Tweak your Search Engine
Most search engines give the option to build a customized thesaurus. This can be very effective in the case of frequently misspelled words, acronyms and commonly used informal terms. Coveo Enterprise Search lists these synonyms at the top of the results page, so users see they made a mistake but still get the results they expected.

Another practical function is what I’ll call “First Results”: Specific keywords can be assigned to a page that will be displayed first in the results. This is particularly useful when corporate information is buried among several other business unit sites. On the intranet in question, a request for “Human Resources” will display first the HR Department belonging to a local business unit, with no sign of any corporate information. To list Corporate HR first, followed by local offices, would be more logical.

More on intranet search:
Step Two Designs - Intranet Search Reports