Social Glass

No, this is not another post about combining social bookmarking and enterprise search. Instead I wanted to highlight how the social dimension of enterprise search - the search terms people use and the links they click as a result - can add to the effectiveness of an enterprise search solution.

The idea is simple:

1. Capture “fruitful” search queries - queries that cause a user to actually click a search result.
2. Capture the link, title, query and timestamp for each search result a user clicks. This can be done by re-writing the URLs to post to the search application first before redirecting to the original link.
3. Display the number of times a document has been viewed (”views:5″, as is the case with the first document in the screenshot). Documents that are viewed more than others tend to be more helpful, and this information can be useful when determining what to look at.
4. Massage the search statistics so that popular search terms are displayed in a “Search tag cloud”. This lets the user knows what the enterprise is looking for and helps create stickiness.

“Rabble” is a simple proof of concept that we developed in Ruby on Rails, and we could probably do a lot more with it. It integrates to a Google Search Appliance on the backend, and I’ve discussed how to do this integration before.

Interestingly, much of the information captured by Rabble exists inside the search appliance, and yet there’s no API to access it. Hopefully such an API is on Google’s roadmap, as information about user behavior can go a long way toward adding a valuable social dimension to enterprise search.