Intranet Smart Search that helps employees find what they need
Not only is poor search function one of the top reasons intranets fail, but it’s also one of the greatest frustrations of employee intranets. Beyond adding another layer of friction to usage and adoption, poor search reduces trust and confidence in the intranet as a whole. In fact, no other intranet feature has lagged further behind users’ expectations and varies more among vendors in terms of quality.
Your intranet’s search capabilities are critical to user experience
Accurate search functionality can make or break a positive user experience on your intranet. When considering an intranet, understanding search functionality is just as important as looking into the user experience. User testing shows that users prefer to find information either through their homepage experience or directly through search navigation. This means that the search capability is critical to help employees accomplish goals in their day-to-day activities within the intranet. Simply put, if the intranet doesn’t help your employee search and find what they’re looking for, employees won’t use it.
Your intranet search capabilities must-haves
Unfortunately, not all search is created equal. When examining search capabilities in an intranet, look for search capability that is powerful enough to:
Personalize results to user needs
Self-learning capabilities should personalize individual’s search experience and continuously improve based on individual interaction.
Deliver the most up-to-date results
Pay close attention to the search indexing processes and evaluate how recency factors into search algorithms. This will help people find the most relevant and recent information.
Search for documents across content systems from one place (your intranet)
As intranets are notorious for having outdated content. A preferable model is to sync search capabilities with other cloud-based knowledge sources. For example, users should be able to find content in your intranet across all of your integrated cloud-based file management systems (eg. Salesforce, Box, GoogleDrive, Office 365, and more) even if it hasn’t been directly uploaded.
Simpplr’s Smart Search
Simpplr’s intelligent search is built into the intranet software, making it easy for employees to search and find day-to-day documents and knowledge. It provides quick access to find and connect with coworkers, files, and more. And it’s available both on desktop and mobile. Because we understand how critical search is to the user experience, we made sure that Simpplr’s Smart Search is:
Federated
You can search the intranet to find relevant content from a variety of content management systems. Plus, intranet administrators don’t have to manually upload files to the intranet for it to work! Simpplr’s Smart Search is federated search across Box, GoogleDrive, Sharepoint, Dropbox, OneDrive, Salesforce Content Libraries, and other best-in-cloud management applications.
Up-to-date
Stay up-to-date with near real-time indexing and backend intelligence, so you’ll find only the most recent and relevant files and documents.
Fast
The underlying search is server-side optimized to provide the fastest results possible, making search your best friend in productivity.
User-friendly and personalized
Simpplr’s Smart Search understands stop words, typos and errors, and autocorrects terms to help you pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for while saving you time. You’ll get the most relevant search results based on individual patterns and popularity.
Artificially Intelligent
Simpplr Smart Search processes natural language across free text, Boolean combinations of text and metadata search, auto-completion, auto-correction, and stemming based on user behavior, relevance, recency, predictability, and popularity.
For example, a few of the things the algorithm considers are:
Relevance
The process of parsing the query to the results while indexing the documents for better and faster results.
Recency
Returns the most recent results in chronological and most recent versions of documents
Predictability
Autocompletes search terms by predicting terms based on the user’s entered prefix
Popularity
The process of indexing and scoring documents based on multiplying the value by weight categories in People, Sites, and Content
Don’t skip out on Smart Search!
Your employees are conditioned to start with search despite the amount of effort you spend structuring your intranet. If you have questions about search, or if you want to find more information about Simpplr’s search function send us an email at hello@simpplr.com.
