Search engines have become a necessary tool to assist users in searching for relevant information not only on the web but also within large multi-national organizations that are content intensive.  Although technologies can change and different search methods are introduced, search engine taxonomy can be vital in improving and enhancing how content is being found.  Taxonomies can typically further improve the search quality by enhancing accuracy and returning user desired results. Let’s have a look at how taxonomy can work to improve search.

Control vocabulary

Content is indexed by what is known as spiders or web crawlers and stored in a database for retrieval when a string or search query matches words, phrase or text within the documents.  The problem with matching text is that words can be worded in many different ways to alter the context as well as words can have several definitions. A taxonomy would be able to associate the phrases and words that are relevant to the search.

Use of metadata

Although not all content is structured and contains relevant metadata such as title, author, description, subject, audience, etc.; for the content that do contain metadata information, it is important to take advantage and leverage from this metadata for use with controlled vocabularies.

Hierarchy structures

Hierarchical structures are a classic example of taxonomies and terms can be arranged in the order of relevance such as parent and child.  By creating a structure of terms, users will be able to search for the most desired term even if they do not know the correct terminology for a subject in mind.

Suggest search queries

It is not uncommon for users to perform search queries on a subject that they do not know how to define or do not known what they are searching until they see it.  A taxonomy can suggest search queries relating to a user’s set of strings and make a relationship with content that may be of interest.