Local heroes

The London Borough of Camden has implemented search technology to give council employees and local residents quick and easy access to online information about its activities and services. Enterprise Information spoke to Ainga Pillai, the council’s corporate applications manager.

ENTERPRISE INFORMATION (EI): In recent years, e-government initiatives and legislation such as the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act have put a great deal of pressure on local authorities to provide information to citizens in a fast and effective way. What has that meant for the London Borough of Camden in terms of how the council deploys search technologies?

Ainga Pillai (AP): It has presented us with quite a challenge. As a UK local authority, we use the Local Government Category List (LGCL) to publish information to our websites. [LGCL is a list that defines the subject matter of content about local government and related community resources according to a common vocabulary]. While that makes it possible for someone who is familiar with LGCL to assign content to pre-defined categories in the course of publishing it to the web, it makes it very difficult for ordinary users to navigate a site because they are unfamiliar with the specific terms used by the LGCL and therefore don’t know what to look for.

As a result, as Camden publishes more and more content online, it has become harder and harder for users – both those inside the council and local residents – to find the information they are looking for by using website navigation alone. We recently decide that a better search strategy would simplify the process for them and encourage users to get the content they need through simple keyword searching rather than navigation.

EI: Does the content management system underlying the council’s website not provide you with search capabilities?

AP: It’s rather more complicated than that. The council’s main site uses APLAWS, an open source content management system designed specifically for UK local authorities, and while this does come with its own built-in search capabilities, we have not extended these capabilities to the other satellite sites we also run. For example, we have our Cindex website, which provides the interface to a comprehensive database of more than 6,000 council departments, services and community organisations around the borough. So really, what we needed to do was to provide unified search across all our sites.

EI: There are a myriad of different search technologies available on the market. What product did you choose and why?

AP: We bought a Google Search Appliance, which is an enterprise product designed to search content that resides behind the firewall. The decision was based mostly on the simplicity of implementing the appliance. When we looked at other search technology out there, we found that most products would require quite a lot of configuration, which we felt would be too costly and time-consuming to suit our project. For example, using other enterprise search products, we realised we would need to spend quite a lot of time deciding how we could provide weighting for certain terms in order that they could be searched, and that the search would produce relevant results for visitors. That would mean spending a lot of time upfront thinking about how users are likely to use search.

In the past, we’ve found that the search tools we were using were not very good in terms of returning relevant results and it was hard to monitor what visitors to the site were searching for, the terms they used to search and so on. So there was quite a lot of ongoing management and maintenance for us.

With the Google Search Appliance, the indexing is done for you and the search engine returns relevant results very quickly. Google was the one product we found that works pretty much out of the box.

EI: Besides the time and cost involved in implementing search technology, were there other features and functions that led you to make this choice?

AP: We liked the fact that the GSA would provide us with statistics on search and with features like sponsored links. We could have built these as addons to any other search technology we had selected, but the price of the GSA and the fact that these features came built-in as part of the one-time cost of the product made Google’s case very compelling. We therefore decided that was the best route to go down in view of our time and cost restraints.

EI: Can you tell me a little more about how you use those features?

AP: Certainly. Our web team ploughs through the search logs in order to get a really good insight into what kind of information users are searching for. That enables them to link information with other related content and information. So that if, for example, someone searches using the term ‘council tax’, other relevant information will automatically be pushed to the search. Sponsored links, meanwhile, enable us to force documents to the top of search results using search term synonyms and grouping web content into sub-collections. We simply list a set of keywords to associate with a particular document and when a user types in those keywords, the document in question will be the first result to appear on the results page.

EI: And how did you get on with implementing the GSA technology?

AP: The appliance took us 15 minutes to install. We simply plugged the appliance into our network using standard Ethernet cables. It comes with a built-in administration console that enables you to configure all the content sources that need to be exposed to the search. Indexing the information from those sources – in our case, our network of websites – was completed overnight and the next day, we were up and running.

In terms of fine-tuning, there was little work to do, because the GSA started returning relevant results straight away. To be fair, there was some minor tweaking with the sponsored links: in some cases, if someone entered a certain phrase, we needed to tune the search appliance to return results containing another, related phrase. But the tweaking required was minimal.

Where we did more work was in making the search fit in with the branding of our website. Out of the box, our search service looks like Google search. We wanted it to look like Camden search and making that change was pretty straightforward to do. We simply uploaded the style sheets we use on the website onto the GSA and the appliance then renders the search and the search results lists in the same style as the rest of the site.

EI: And what has been the effect of implementing this technology?

AP: What we’ve seen is that searches have risen higher and higher on our website since we installed Google. At present, we handle about 30,000 searches a day. Our next plan is a total re-branding of the site so that the search function is much more prominent on the user interface. So instead of being a small box tucked away in the top right-hand corner, search will be larger and clearer, because we want to encourage users to choose search over navigation to find the information that they require.

We’ve also recently launched a new intranet that provides information about council policy, news and so on to all of our employees across the Borough. That is already helping us get away from an ‘information silo’ mentality, because it enables staff to see a very wide range of information, from personnel changes, office opening times to the canteen menu. But in order to find what they’re looking for quickly on the intranet, employees needed better search capabilities, so we’ve bought another Google search appliance for that.

What we’ve done is link that appliance to a number of internal systems, from our Microsoft Active Directory, which contains information and contact details for all members of staff, to various back-office database systems. All our intranet content and a wide range of back-office data is now fully searchable from a single source.

The appliance also links to our external website to give staff access to that through the employee intranet – because we want to encourage internal use of the website as an authoritative source of council information.

That integration task was a little more complicated. We had to do a little work to get databases exposed to search but much of it is handled by the GSA APIs [application programming interfaces]. That work is ongoing, because we are finding that there are many distributed Microsoft Access databases scattered around the council that we would like to tie in to the employee intranet and expose to the unified search technology we now have.

EI: And what has been the response from council employees and borough residents?

AP: It has been overwhelmingly positive. For a start, this is helping the council to respond more quickly to enquiries from residents. They can either search the web themselves for information and get that information more quickly, or they can contact the council and an employee will use the intranet to find the information that the resident is searching for in a far more efficient way.

Training is obviously pretty minimal because many users are already familiar with internet search engines and some of them are already pretty good at more complex searches. It’s mostly keywords, after all – and it doesn’t take long to train anyone to put a keyword into a search box and press enter.

Site search statistics

Nine-tenths of companies report that search is the number one means by which visitors navigate their website…

But 80% of website visitors will abandon a site if search functionality is poor.

Source: Jupiter Media Matrix

85% of website searches don’t return what the user is seeking and 22 per cent return no results at all…

But organisations save an average of $30 every time a user is able to answer their own enquiry using online search, instead of having to talk to a customer service representative.

Source: IDC