Most news sites don’t generally pay much attention to developing internal search; though search, after navigation, is perhaps the important tool visitors use to find content.

And here, the quality of a news site’s internal search is an important factor and there’s no point in having search that offers no better results than Google does.

Often the internal search engines are either the default ones that come withe CMS - not much attention is paid to fine-tuning them or developing them further; or third party solutions, or a Google solution. The search quality will also depend on how the site uses metadata.

Some days ago the BBC announced a “phased roll-out of our new site search.” It constituted a “major departure” from enterprise search designs, a BBC blog said.

The post on the BBC Internet blog is quite interesting and offers an insight into how news sites could evolve their own was of improving search. For instance, the search output is grouped into zones that “order themselves on the page depending on the search query, the matching content available and what we think users find most important. ”

Or that search result pages will have unique and persistent urls. “This makes it very easy for people to link to everything that the BBC has about a topic.”

The results have indeed vastly improved. I recall searching for BBC stories on Antartica-related global warming stories using BBC’s internal search, Google News search and Google search a couple of years ago. Not surprisingly an advanced Google search yielded the best results. It came up with three or four stories from the BBC site (Google News came up with only one story). And the BBC’s internal search engine came up with results that did not include the latest stories that Google had unearthed - at least not on the first page.

I tried something like that again a few days ago using BBC search, and this time results were more spot on, like the kind of results I wanted. So far so good!

Link to post: BBC launches Enhanced Search.