[Sigia-l] Testing a Search installation or implementation

[John Malhinha]

"O'Neill, Todd" <todd.oneill at usaa.com> wrote on 2/25/2004, 12:01 PM:
 >
 > I'm a search engine newbie, as you may have suspected from my last post.
 > So I have another question or info request for you all.
 >
 > I live, professionally, in a world of software development. Where a
 > website is composed of multiple "applications" and code is "deployed"
 > each week. CMM is the rule of the day. ALL of our pages are extensively
 > tested, since much of our content is imbedded in software applications.
 >
 > So we are putting a search engine on our site and our IT folk wish to
 > run it through 3 weeks or so of software application product rigor. You
 > know, test cases, daily defect meetings, etc.
 >
 > From the business point of view we would like to: A. Get it installed;
 > B. Connect it to our site; C. Crawl, Index, Repeat. We tune, tune, tune
 > to hone the results to a fine edge, then continue tuning for the
 > lifespan of the product.
 >
 > I am oversimplifying (to some extent.)
 >
 > Search Tool Implementation is an area that I have not been able to find
 > any best practice information. My business objective is to deploy a
 > search engine to our customers that will be a benefit to them. And that
 > I can, from a business perspective, continue to make better. I
 > understand that I could have hired a consultant to guide us through but
 > that wasn't an option.
 >

Search Engine Watch has an article/set of links (all close to a year 
old) pertaining to the tool side of things:

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/resources/article.php/2156591

And Jacon Nielsen has a white paper detailing design guidelines for 
search interfaces & results:

http://www.nngroup.com/reports/ecommerce/search.html

Hope it helps.

//jm



J O H N  M A L H I N H A
UI Designer
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