ABC News Gets Geospatial
ABC News Gets Geospatial
September/October Edition, 2007: The geospatial features from Fluster display stories as a virtual pin stuck into a map of Australia allowing users to zoom in and out and specify distances to find localized news.
Search can make or break a website, especially for the online presence of a major Australian news outlet. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is reeling in the page views as their search engine becomes the secret weapon of a ‘smoke and mirrors effect’ for visitors.
The ABC has built up a solid reputation as one of the major players in online news. Whilst repeat visitors are quite common, ensuring they stay on the website for more then just one or two articles requires a little something extra, and that’s where the ABC’s secret weapon comes into play.
That secret weapon is a search engine which generates the news video and audio pages on the ABC site, and offers an interactive interface using a web development tool like Ajax. Darryl Lewis, publishing services manager at the ABC likes to call this, “a smoke and mirrors effect, as people don't know the content is being produced from a search engine. Well, actually, your readers now do know...so don't tell anyone!”
The 12 million searches on the ABC news archive in July alone proves that with such a high volume of searches, it’s essential users find the content they are looking for as fast as possible to keep bandwidth costs low. It’s also important for users to be guided towards other content and articles of interest to keep them on the website. Coming face to face with the challenge, the ABC installed a customised ‘Fluster’ search engine, produced by CSIRO offshoot company, Funnelback.
In addition to the standard suite of search features, the Fluster engine generates a variety of additional search options summarised in a “Have you tried…” box which gently guides users towards additional or related content. This feature really starts to shine during failed searches, where the search terms fail to match up to any content the user was interested in, the user will instead be directed towards a list of targeted articles related to the keywords.
Another feature of the Fluster implementation is geospatial searching, a fancy way of saying it displays news items on a local area map. The geospatial features display stories as a virtual pin stuck into a map of Australia allowing users to zoom in and out and specify distances to display all stories in a particular area. The distance limiting feature is important because without it, a user’s map becomes flooded with pins, which is not very informative but fun to try at least once.
Geospatial features are a sexy topic in the search world as the possibilities of local area based searching are starting to become known. Despite the hype though, there has been a noticeable reluctance by businesses to actually implement these features and by consumers to use them when they’re made available. According to Lewis, most of the reluctance has come from people being unsure what benefits arise from it, or believing it’s too difficult to try.
The ABC is taking a bold step forward by incorporating geospatial mapping into their entire online news reporting process. Currently the only exceptions are stories which have no discernible location. “An example of this could be those of a general political nature, which affect all of Australia,” says Lewis. “Those are a little hard to pin down to a specific location, so we ignore them.”
Failed searches result in wasted bandwidth and unhappy consumers, neither of which is good for business. “Users need around 1.3 search terms to attempt to find the content they are after. Across an excess of 3 million documents, it becomes a needle in the haystack problem very quickly,” says Lewis. “The use of 'Fluster' allows our users to see the categories and some suggested topics to further refine their general search into a more specific one. With one or two clicks that haystack is soon down to 3 or 4 straws.”
For the busy news reporter, indexing Geospatial features takes no discernible additional time on top of that spent indexing the original story. Lewis points out there might be a few micro seconds here or there, but on the whole, there is no noticeable time difference to that of preparing a 'normal' page.
The ABC Shop is also heavily using the search technology to provide items and images to online shoppers. With so many items in the shop, search provides a simple way to zero in on what a user likes. This further highlights the need for an in depth related article display like what’s provided by Fluster to prevents users being left out in the cold after a failed search, particularly for something completely sales driven such as an online shop.
In addition to the Fluster features, the ABC has been implementing its own in house improvements to navigate the website. This includes building 'wizards' allowing people to search on topics of interest through a simple interface without needing to type in search queries.
Most organisations don’t have the massive 500,000 search queries per day that the ABC often sees, but having an optimised search engine is important regardless. Search should be there to guide users, whether or not this will see an increased usage of geospatial features remains to be seen but having the option helps ensure those who land on the page, actually stay there.