Guardian News and Media is tweaking the content management and search functions on its Web sites as the U.K. publisher adds more fuel to its Internet capabilities.

“We’re working on a new design for our search at the moment,” said Stephen Dunn, head of technology for Guardian Media. “And we’re relying on a user-centered design process to find out what users’ goals are with respect to their search.”

GNM in September 2005 substantially upgraded its www.guardian.co.uk and www.autotrader.co.uk Web sites, tapping Cambridge, Mass.-based Endeca Technologies Inc. to provide both content management and search, Dunn said.

 

The app digs deeper than many common search tools available for newspapers, Dunn said, and thus has allowed GNM to deliver its readers more tightly focused results. The software also allows users to find buried results.

“We were attracted to Endeca because the guided navigation approach fit with our multifaceted content management strategy, and we also found the developer tools to be very useable, in particular the means by which the search engine ingests and indexes data,” Dunn said.

Marked increase

Since upgrading its sites’ search capabilities, GNM has enjoyed an increase in clickthroughs, with rates growing 50 percent in the past three months. At the same time, Dunn said the number of unsuccessful searches has decreased.

“We’ve incorporated guided navigation, content spotlighting and recently have included multimedia results,” he said.

Reader feedback has been positive, Dunn said.

“Our initial release probably had a few too many sophisticated features, which we soon remedied,” he said. “Overall, readers say they are easily finding the content they are looking for.”

As part of updating the sites’ search capabilities, GNM launched a detailed study of words and phrases users type in to guide future design and ranking strategies.

“We’ll also continue to adjust the search engine following user feedback,” Dunn said.

A functional CMS is key for any newspaper, but so are search tools, and Dunn said search tools represent an area where newspapers often fall short, largely because of a lack of good solutions.

“Many implementations out there do a worse job than public search engines,” he said.

Finding out how users search

Dunn’s advice to other newspapers looking to improve their online search functions? Conduct research with real users.

That’s how GNM, for example, determined that most users begin their search for information with Google — and that affects how search should be optimized, Dunn said.

“Even if all your content is indexed publicly, enterprise search can still provide a better user experience than public search provided you implement it well,” Dunn said.

Deidre Caldbeck, Endeca’s market lead for publishing, said the firm’s software is “repository-agnostic,” in that it can bring content together, no matter where it resides.

The Endeca CMS is used to store data, manage workflow and allow publishers to share information with other divisions, she said.

“CMS don’t generally have a good search function. We take the content for that and leverage it for the user experience.”                

Other newspaper publishers using Endeca include Cox Newspapers, McClatchy Co., E.W. Scripps Co. and Bizjournals.