SharePoint Web Parts For An Improved User Search Experience

The taxonomy browser web part gives users an alternative, subject based view of their content.

The web part can be placed on any site page.   The web part will show a hierarchical tree view of the selected taxonomy and a count of the documents a user can see (i.e. all security trimming is maintained) for each taxonomy node.

No longer do you have to know where a colleague might have filed a document that you know is on "distance learning" - browse through the taxonomy and select the term to see all the items on that subject.

The topic map web part is a derivative of the taxonomy browser.   The web part is placed on the Search Results page and its content is scoped to the results returned by the user query.

Any taxonomy terms which have no results are excluded from the tree.

Clicking on a taxonomy node will filter the current search results to those that are tagged with the term selected.

User searches are not always precise, multi-word queries that give SharePoint search enough information to return a reasonable result set.  They are often ambiguous, or use terms that they are familiar with, but do not match the content.

The Search Suggestions web part helps users refine their search.

Initial a "concept map" process is run.  In the screen-shot shown a query for "policy" returned a number of possible matches where "policy" or "policies" is in the taxonomy as a main term or a synonym.

Selecting the term will re-execute a metadata search - returning items that have be classified, for example as "Common Agricultural Policy".

The web part then turns to another part of the taxonomy - related terms.

The taxonomy design team can map topics together using a associative relationships like "related to". This helps users discover new areas around the topic they originally searched on. They can be confident that the results will be appropriate as it was a domain expert, and not a random clustering mechanism that made the link.

In this example, "Subsidies" is related to "Common Agricultural Policy.

Best bet results allow the taxonomy design team to suggest the best page or document for a user when they search on a taxonomy term.  The information is held in the taxonomy (a URL, title and description) and surfaced by the web part.

In this example, the user selected "Genetically modified food crops" from the Semaphore Search Suggestions web part and the top result shown is a best bet link suggesting they reference the Food Standards Agency site.  All the normal site results for GM foods are then listed.