This session introduces a new approach to explaining the world of Search in the Drupal ecosystem. This approach is used by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! to better understand the content they find on your site, and improve the online search experience.
The basic principle of this new technology is to move away from a web composed of keywords and shift to a smarter way of representing information found on the Web. For example, the Knowledge Graph is how Google indexes the information it finds on the web: web pages are no longer indexed as a monolithic blurb of plain text or HTML, but instead, each entity (people, places, news, events, etc) is extracted from each page and stored in a massive database. This entity extraction process also reads attributes like title of a news article, date and location of an event, name of a person etc. Other attributes might be links between entities, such as those found in social networks where people know each other and belong to particular groups. Once all these entities are stored in the Knowledge graph, Google is able to answer questions such as "what are the events happening near Boston on July 4th". The key innovation lies in the ability to match concepts and entities from a search query to the entities from the knowledge graph, whereas before, search engines were just trying to match keywords from the search query to their web index.
Secondly, we will show how this can positively impact your own internal search tools and how to benefit twice from configuring this metadata on your own website. We will start from scratch on a Drupal site in a semi-continuous demo to a fully functional website that is using this metadata to drive the generation of both search snippets and Faceted Search. We will be using Solr as our backend to power the search.
In this session, you will learn how to:
• Setup a Drupal site with metadata
• Benefit from configuring metadata on your own site with an eye towards SEO
• Leverage this new approach for your own Solr-powered search tools
This session was presented a few months ago at BADcamp and at other local events.
Comments
Highly recommended
@scor is a great speaker and I was lucky to see this one at BADcamp last year. It was an entertaining and informative talk, and the part about integrating these concepts into internal search tools was mind-blowing to me.