*Intranet search* was the subject of the Intranet show and tell event that took place at the Ministry of Justice in London on 2 December 2010. The bad weather meant that a lot of people could not make the event, but we managed to get 17 people around the table.
There was a diverse set of talks ranging from working with intranet content and metadata to back-end coding of the search interfaces and the nuts and bolts of the underlying systems.
I kicked off the talks with a quick history of how we have improved the search experience for staff by paying attention to metadata within our HQ intranet content, using Google Search Appliance. I also showed some of our search analytics and infographics that we are starting to use for data visualisation.
Simon Thompson (@thompsonsimon) and Angel Brown (@angelbrownuk) organised the event. Simon showed us some bespoke programming of Sharepoint to enable typeahead search results for both people and intranet content using jQuery.
Tyler Tate (@tylertate) managed to connect through Skype to do a remote session on *Dealing with diverse data* giving examples of search results page interfaces based on different data sources.
Tom Mortimer from Flax gave a very detailed presentation about restricting search results based on user credentials. And Rangi Robinson (@rangfu) from Framestore demo’d his staff intranet people search.
Great to see support from @Funnelback. And sorry we were unable to hear from Martin White from @IntranetFocus who was snowed in.
I noted a lack of talk about what I term *social search*, allowing staff to tag and rate search results. I would be interested to hear how this is being used by anyone.
Lastly, big thanks to @starhorseUK for adding the finishing touches to the room booking and for helping our guests into the building.