Panoptic and CSIRO used as an example of search engine 'Best bets'

James Robertson provides a discussion of why and how to make use of what he calls 'best bets' in a search solution. Although it doesn't say so, the example screenshot he provides is through the Panoptic search engine. Having been involved with the development of Panoptic in its very early days (circa 1999) while at ANU, I thought it might be interesting to recall why we added it into the product back then. (As of the last 3 weeks, I am now employed by CSIRO, as part of the Enterprise Search group, which develops Panoptic still.) One of the characteristics of any large federated enterprise (such as a university or large corporation) is that there can be a mass of content, of quite varying nature. What makes it doubly hard is that much of the evidence that can be found on the web at large in anchor text (which leads to much better result ranking in general) is not available from within the enterprise's own content. The properties of the search engine's ranking algorithm may mean that the top ranking answer(s) do not include the one(s) perceived by the organisation as the "correct" one(s) for a particular query. With Panoptic's very first customer (the ANU), from memory it was either "library" or "biology" led to exactly the scenario described. The ANU Library home page was not listed close to top (or possibly even on the first page of results). We examined the text of the Library home page, and could see why it would not be ranked highly due to the words used. However, the home page for the Library was serving its purpose just fine. This still holds true today, as can be seen in this search for library at ANU. The library home page is listed as result 18, but as a featured page, it's top of the list. The solution was to implement what in Panoptic is called "featured pages", or "best bets" as James calls it. This mechanism allows the search engine operators to identify the preferred results for particular queries, thereby guaranteeing they appear at the top of the list, while still distinguishing them from the ranked results.