by Denise Bedford with commentary by Jean Graef

January, 2007

How do you improve the performance of your search engine? Buy a new one? Add a taxonomy? Clean up your content? Under the guidance of Denise Bedford, the World Bank is taking a systematic approach to the problem by developing a formal set of best practices for search systems. A full text search engine like Google or FAST may be only one part of a search system.

In this article we describe the best practices approach to improving search performance and discuss its implications. Topics covered include:

• What is a search system?
• What are best practices and why use them?
• How are best practices developed?
• What issues should best practices address?
• How can best practices be implemented?

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Created on 2/1/2007 l Updated on February 16, 2007