This blog is a continuation of my previous blog, ‘Social Media – Who really cares how many Tweets you get’. We are turning our attention to SharePoint Online.
The Recommendations feature. This feature is similar to an Internet search, where the end user is offered ‘people who viewed this also viewed.’ Although this feature is very helpful in a business to consumer environment, within an enterprise environment it is not particularly so, as it is based on the volatility of the end user queries as opposed to identifying the relevance of a query. What I can’t figure out, is most users click on the wrong document about four times during a search, how does the search engine know I am incompetent and I keep picking the wrong documents?
Another one is Event Based Relevancy. This is an analytics component that works as an Internet search engine and analyzes how content is connected, how often an item appears in a search result, and which search results are clicked. The analytics component tracks and analyzes this information and uses it to continuously improve relevance. The premise again would be questionable to me due to the dynamics of how end users search.
To refer back to my previous blog, the ability to like or dislike a document is actually irrelevant. If the document that is retrieved has nothing to do with I ‘was actually looking for’, I may, in a bad mood only, say, I ‘dislike’ this document. Rather subjective depending on the search query, the role of the user, and the relevancy to what they are searching for.
What do all of you think about bells and whistles in search engines, when none of them ever return the documents you are looking for anyway?