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Good morning. My name is Arantxa Piperova. I am the Search.gov customer success manager. I'm the first point of contact if you have questions. This is a solution that federal agencies can use to provide high-quality search experience to users. The program is a service of the General services administration supporting over 2000 websites over 30% of domains. Today we're going to provide a basic overview on Search.gov the essential features. You can ask questions during this webinar through two channels. The YouTube channel, the link is on the bottom of the screen, and you can send your question to our other link. She is the program manager for Search.gov and she helps users experience in searching government websites.
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Thank you for joining us today and thank you for the introduction. At Search.gov the mission is to help people find what they are looking for on government websites and also to make your lives easier, the agency users of our service as you are managing the search experience for public users. This session is an overview of the services admin center, but we will also have references to more advanced features, which we hope you will follow up with us on if they are of interest to you. The main things that we hope you take away from this session are you do plan to talk to us about indexing, that you take an active hand with your search features so searchers will be able to use the system to its fullest, and that you not only begin to look at your analytics, but also to use them to inform how you manage your search. We will talk more about each of these in the hour that we have together. Please send questions through the chat panel or the email and we will answer them about halfway through and then at the end. A recording will be available on the registration page and we will post a link on the training page afterwards. A quick background on search.gov. We began in 2000 and then turned into USA.gov and in 2010 we shifted to a cloud-based available to any government agency. The goal is to make it easier for people to find things on the federal government websites. We are a government to government service so we take care of 508 accessibility, security assessment and accreditation and all that. And then also, as mentioned earlier, we power about 2000 search configurations, including 13 cabinet level department websites and we serve about 175 agencies overall. If you don't have an account yet, you can register and get started. The service is free. Sometimes notifications get in spam filters, so if you don't get an email to verify your address, let us know. If you are a contractor without a.gov address, we will need confirmation from your government POC about your status and we can activate your account. We have a search site launch guide available that will walk you through the steps you want to take to get your experience going and in the rest of the webinar we will look at specific tools available to you in the admin center. Let's look at where we want to go. NIH has branded their search page to complement their own website and they are making recommendations using our best bets feature pulling in actual listings from USA jobs. They have relevant video and then down here we have web results, and at the bottom they have related searches here related to the jobs. I will show you other modules. NASA is the in-line videos module and this is the RSS news module right here, which pulls items from the RSS feeds. The images facet looks like this. And the videos facet looks like this in these link images and videos to the original posting locations for the videos. In this case YouTube or in the case of images either the location on the website where the item is located flicker. At treasury.gov they use our best bets module. Oberon Army.gov this is a preview of what the RSS news facet looks like. You saw that on the front page of a couple of the others with the Page 1 module looks like with a couple of selected items and then this is one that is feeding straight from the newsfeeds. At the top of NIH they have options for refining the results by type. And you also have an option to run the same search in Spanish. Let's go into the admin center to see how this comes to be. When you first log in as a new user, you will be taken to the at site screen. If you want to be added to an existing search site, and what you want to do is enter your URL and we will give the results page a display name, which is using a couple different places. And then we are going to decide on a handle, which is often an acronym or short form of your name and this is used in your results page URL. Some agencies have created a test search site, which you can flag as a test I adding something in four-minute to the site handle itself. At the bottom you can choose a display language, if needed. Going over to the Spanish interface, you can see that facet of the top in the page text is on Spanish. They set up the Spanish language when establishing this search site. We will click over here in the upper right. You can also trigger a page save by hitting enter if one of the fields is active. In the system will give you signals if you need to make corrections to your configuration changes. Let's start with a quick spin around the admin center. Those that have more than one site membership can navigate between them using this drop-down list at the top of the screen. If you -- you will always be taken to your default search site, which is established by hitting this pushpin right here. If you want to decide which is the first site you want to see logging in, then you will hit this button we already looked at the add site. This is here for you to send us suggestions on product development. So if you ever find yourself thinking, if only I could, something something, let us know what you want. The need help button has our contact information as well as a link to the full help manual and the training page on the website, which has videos. And then help manual link here on each page will take you to the specific page for the item that you are looking for. On the left-hand side of the screen are the action centers for managing your site. At the top is the dashboard and nexus he analytics followed by content management, display management, this eyeball launches a preview, and at the bottom is the activation section. Each one of these has subsections, which show up in this grey panel right here. Let's take a look at a robust search configuration so we can see all the features. After you have a site set up, the dashboard will give an overview of the search traffic of the day. And I Chase NIH let us use this and there is not any data to show, but we will see a good example when we look at analytics later on. You can have an analytic snapshot emailed to you if you click this envelope button right here. And if you belong to multiple sites, you can hit this button to get the daily analytics overview. From the dashboard you can manage the users list. So to add a site -- to add a user you will click this link in the upper right. You want to enter the person's full name and email address, and then click add, which is great because I have not entered anything. And if someone leaves the team, you can use this remove button to remove access to the site. Some of you may see color coding on the page, so if you see yellow or red highlighting, that account is not fully functional, which you also see with this label right here. Read means that the person is not approved and so if they should have access, this can happen for number of reasons. This will be true because in the very near future we will be implementing and automatic account disabling for users how are inactive for 90 days. So keep that in mind. And, again, we can work to get the access reinstated. Yellow means they have not yet responded to our email notification. As I mentioned, sometimes spam filters will catch our notifications. We can resend it, or if the person has not responded, they can hit the button and get their account set up. And if they should be removed from the team entirely, just hit the remove button. It is nice in addition to the specific people that your including in a site if you also register a general team account. So like a web team and if there is turnover, there will always be one note entry point to the admin center. But all changes to the search site should be done through individual user accounts. Under settings over here it shows the information that was submitted when the site was added. And should you need to update the URL for your display name, then this is where you come. The URL is used to pull in social media and RSS feeds and will be linked behind the logo on your results page. Clone site allows you to make a copy of the site to a new instance. So if you want to get a site set up and make a sandbox copy of it or make a production copy, this is a good option for that. You will give it a new handle and then hit submit. Let's look at content management. The overview provides access to each of the subsections, which are also listed in this grey panel. We have domains to be included in the default search, collections for changing the search scope, we have best bets, two different varieties for curating the results., Routed queries, RSS feeds for sending us your content directly from newsfeeds or your content management system, and social media integrations like YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr. This and this green button will look for media accounts on your homepage or any other page you might specify. It will scan that page. A lot of agencies have a list of many RSS feeds and you can type that in and hit the discover button and we will scan that page to pick up what we can. The domain section defines the primary scope of your search. Many people have a single domain listed here, but many want to provide a portal search across domains that are managed I the or agency. So you see that NIH has the main domain, but also a number of campaign websites and specific Institute websites. This will bring in subdomains and subdirectories, but if you want to limit your default search to just a portion of the website you can do so by adding a subdomain and/or specifying a folder. Here you see this one that I added during a previous training. So to add a domain just click domain in the upper right corner and we will put this and you will see here it is in the domain list. You can repeat the process as many times as you need, but if you do end up with more than a handful, we ask that you talk to us about your search needs because there is a limit to what the search system can handle in any given query in these additional domains make the query longer, so we would be happy to talk with you about making sure the search provides We are looking for. And to remove or edit, you would hit the edit button and you can remove the domain entirely with this remove button. By default any new search site that you set up will be connected to the being index. If it is expected to receive higher than 150,000 queries, you will want to reach out to us. We have a couple of other webinars on indexing that you might be interested in, so here is everything you need to know about indexing with search.gov. And then also our training page, as I mentioned, is linked at the top of the admin center but you will see all of our previous sessions right here that have special topics and we always have the most recent session like this one. In addition to traffic levels, there are other considerations that might lead us to index directly. If you have a small site and you think that direct indexing would be a good choice, please reach out and we would be happy to talk with you. For all the smallest sites we work with you to get your index sites and we will also make a back and change to make sure that those results show up we have set up the scope of the search and let's see about changing that. There are three ways to do this. Collections are used to narrow the scope of the search to a particular section of a site, or in the case of a site like USA.gov or other portal sites, they sometimes start broad and use a collection to search against their own site. So on USA.gov you will see that they have all government and then they have a collection called USA.gov only. You can also create a collection for a division or information on a breaking issue. You can also use collections to broaden your search by pulling an additional domains. To create one you come to the upper right corner, and just like with domains you can add as many as you want. You can see recent ones that I was looking at, but you will want to have the protocol in here and then this collection would search against all against Search.gov and the resources folder on Digital.gov and -- let's take that out and we will hit add and now you can see the test collection is listed right here. Again, you can -- this preview button will take you to a search facets view of that collection and the edit button allows you to edit that and then the remove button allows you to remove it. Here We are looking at which bucket of information to look and. You want to put a path in here and not the index page for the content. So the times when this is especially important is where if the index page lives at one path, but the files are stored in the files folder, then we want that files folder to be what is linked because that is the location of the items. If we get the path for the index page, we will look underneath that path and will not get us to the content. The second way that you can change your search scope is within RSS feed. We saw that with the Army RSS module and we will take a quick look at this later. And then the third way that you can alter your search scope is to set up an entirely separate search site pointed at a specific section of your site and a good example of this is the Spanish search experience that NIH has and this search is in the Spanish folders within each domain. You can also set up a distinct looking field or a different set of modules, and then using a separate search site would give you a separate set of analytics. Let's say you want to curate your results and push particular items to the top of the page so people will see them. This functions a lot like advertisements at the top of Google. There are text and graphics and I will show you how this works. These at the top are text best bets and you can see that there will be a recommended by label and this is the display name that they entered when they set up the site. And then, if you search for trials, this is what a graphics best bet looks like. There are a set of items that are all on a related topic and this is a nice option if you have several items that you want to push to the top. You can group them under a topic heading and make it easier for the searcher to review the options. The images optional. Back in the admin center you would manager best bets here if on this list you click on the title link, and to edit this particular item if you want to do so afterwards, you need to use the edit button. I have tripped on this a number of times myself, so if you click on this you will not get into it and you need to come over to the Spartan. And of course we have a remove button. You can control the display some are marked as inactive and are yellow. We will look at those individual settings in a moment. If you build up a large set of best bets, it will be in the admin center and you can use the search box at the top and it will be sure and everything that matches that. They are always sorted by the most recently updated first. To add a new one go to the right-hand corner and hit this button and we will enter the URL that we want to recommend. In this case I will not type this all out, but we would add the URL and give it a title and add the description text this controls the text and this is text that they have entered. It could be the summary of a page or an issue and it is a really nice way to do user centered keyword descriptions. And if there is something on your site that searchers look for, then this is a really great tool to use. So for example, USCIS gets searches for passport applications and the Department of State handles those, so they have two best bets set up and one is for the page on passports and the other is a link where they have put the URL straight to the appropriate state.gov page to get people to the right place. After you set up the link and the description for your best bet, you can control how it works. By default it will be on and if you wanted inactive, you can change that setting here and then you can use this calendar function to set it to turn itself on if you are starting out with it inactive or to turn itself off at the appropriate time. This is nice for information that has a seasonal nature and you don't want to have the best bet appearing in the wrong season and you can have it turn on and off around that season so you can reuse the same thing year after year. Down at the bottom you can enter keywords. You can enter one or a lot, but to enter a lot, please use this -- this might be hard to see -- there is add another keyword link and they do need to be one per field. If you enter them separated with a comma, it will not work right. You can do as many as you want. They are not case sensitive, but they are exact matches otherwise. So choose words here that don't duplicate word to already have in the title and description, but then, also, you want to include variants like plurals or acronyms or different forms of the word. By default we match on title and description and keywords, but if for whatever reason you want to use terms in your title and description that are very general but you want the recommendation to shop for context, you can use this match keywords only and it will match on the keywords so you want to be sure that you have covered the scope of the terms that you want the recommendation to trigger and then also that you include all of the variants that you want to trigger for. So banana in one field and bananas in the next field. And exact matches for the keywords. Don't forget to eat -- don't forget to add in the corner. The graphics best bets are similar and instead of entering a description, you enter a link or set of links. So here we have the title, and the title URL is the same. Here we have active or inactive and the calendar function that we looked at. This is where you can choose to show an image in the arm maximum file sizes noted. We would love it if you gave the image alternate text and down here we have the same keywords interface where you can add multiple keywords to your best bet search triggers. At the bottom is where the actual links are set up. Here you can see that this one includes four and so in the best bet -- actually, let's look at this. In the best bet they have set up the title. It is not linked to anything in the title and they have given it some alternate text and keywords and down here -- it is four in production and we have the link and the link text in the link as you manage that and you can change the order of the links using these list icons on the left. And then after you are done, of course, you want to hit safe. Let's look at routed queries. NIH does not have routed queries set up, but I'm initially one inaction. If you know exactly what page you want searchers to end up on, you can use the routed queries feature to bypass the search results page entirely and get them where they need to be. So this is particularly good when you always want someone with an interest in a particular topic to start from the landing page and not end up on the pages and you can lead them to that funnel. Let me show you how this works. USA.gov has set up a routed query for missing money. None of the pages say missing money, but people come to USA.gov looking for missing money, so they started this routed query. When I click this, it will come to the system and we are going to send people to a redirect straight to the page that has been set up. So here we are on the unclaimed money from the government page within USA.gov. People don't have to look for bunch of search results, this is where they need to be. So I will stop for questions after the next section. So send them in if you have not already. To set up a routed query, let's look at this quickly. You tell us what URL you want to have and you would give a description. This is for your purposes in the list so you know what the point of this routed query is and the keywords that you wanted to respond to. So in the case of USA.gov, they have put missing money and other relevant queries in these keyword field. All rights. Let's look at RSS feeds and social media. When you add a site where you hit the Discover button we will pull in social media accounts and RSS feeds that we find on your page. Anything that the system cannot detect automatically, you can't you can add manually. As with site users you can add as many of these as you want. Click add on the right and enter the URL for the RSS feed and you give the feed a name. This name is what is used on the search results page right here, so this is managed through this feed name. And then, you want to remember to click add when you finish. You can also send us a straight RSS feed or media RSS feed if you want to send a curated set of images. For videos you can add the YouTube channel URL -- it would look like this that you want to include and then you can include as many of these as you want. For twitter, when you enter a handle, we will display the tweets. Let me show you this. Under add twitter handle you can put in the handle there and then if you check this, show tweets from my list, and then hit add, it would pull in again all those additional accounts. This particular -- back in the day, NIH had a lot of accounts listed in our service, but if we look in the production search site now, you would see that they have the main NIH search handle set up that has the show tweets from my list and that allows them to manage the list of what is included in only one place. That is a nice feature. And then, after you add something new, don't forget to click on add and then for Flickr, you can add a Flickr account. NIH does not have one set up that they have added, so I don't have one to show you. This is a good place to stop for questions. Do we have any so far? 
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Yes. Can you hear me? 
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Yes. Yes we have a couple of questions. I'm going to begin with the first one. I'm interested in learning about service limits that users of the tool may have. What if an agency is handling millions of search queries per day? Is the tool still available for use by them? 
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Millions a day? I don't think the IRS has millions a day. That is one where I would want to say let's touch base after because I'm super interested by that level of traffic. I do know that the system can handle Inauguration Day and tax day, but that is worth talking about further. We don't have any set limits at this time. We would definitely index you directly ourselves rather than using being.
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Is there a way to test searches without the system catching the searches in the data? 
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No. We do collect all the search data and we can look at that in a bit, but what I would recommend in that case is to fire up a separate search site so that you can have your test traffic segregated from your production traffic. We lock everything.
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The next question says for recently redesigned sites, what can I do to refine search results within Search.gov as well as external search results? 
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Fabulous. Search is a very straightforward and technical thing and it has to do with the quality of the metadata within your page templates in your search site -- excuse me -- your website -- and you can put these things in place. Let me go over to this everything you need to know about indexing page. We have some pages about what we index from your site, how we rank your search results. So Google and Bing there is a whole industry grown up about trying to discern what Google is using as search ranking factors and sometimes they show their hand, but most of the time they keep a close to the chest. We are making our ranking factors is broadly known as possible because we want to make sure you can use these tools to improve your search results. The biggest one is date metadata and then, also, making sure that you have unique description metadata in your pages and -- let me show you over here. Metadata and tags. We have a number of things that we have tips on how to implement this and the title should be unique. A number of websites do not have unique
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Anyone's questions that we don't have we will follow-up to get the info that you need. In the admin center we are going to look at this Monitor button will be manage the display. You can turn on and off the results and some are only available as facets or tabs across the top and then some are available only as in-line modules. Those are on page 1 and that would be like tweets and the Federal Register. Some are available as both. So here's where you can toggle the different features on and off and you need to turn them on and hit save in order for the change to be effective everything is effective immediately and you can also change the order that the facets would appear in using this list button on the left and you can see that NIH has set up a lot of collections and they have set up collections that are not currently in use on the results page. You can search a collection independently and so if you want to have a super focused search experience, reach out to us and we can help you search a disabled collection. And this is where you have the opportunity to change the labels of the search items in your facets. So here, you see they've made everything all caps, this is where they managed those changes. And again, you would want to hit save if everything is turned off then you will not see this menubar across the top. You will get a result count, but otherwise you would not see the menu at all. Down here under modules these are modules that we handle ourselves and health topics come from MEDLINEplus and here if you don't see job openings or Federal Register and you want to provide a search against those, let us know and we will hook something up in the backend so that you can come in here and toggle that on. In order to manage recent tweets, we have to remove the handle from the search experience. And then this will show a search results page that shows similar queries and at the bottom this is where he manage the transition between search experiences and this is where NIH has set up that link above the search button that get to back and forth between English and Spanish. I'm trying to hit the so quickly. Fonts and colors is straightforward. In order to customize it, you do have to hit custom and you can modify those. You can enter codes here to get an exact match. And then you can see a preview here. Image assets is where you will upload the logo and add a link. You can see here that this -- web at the top you have this little Chevron logo and that is being sourced directly from their file. Down here at the bottom you can align the logo and we hope that you will give the logo some alt text but if you do not, we will use the display name for your search site as the alt text for your local. And as always if you make changes you want it's a. Hit save. Here we have the tagline and the option to make the tagline a link. This would take us back and there is no logo in my demo site, but this is -- you can also set up header links. Also down here they have one to their contact page and that is managed in the header and footer links. And always hit save after you make changes. And you can also set up a custom message for the no results page. We don't always display, sorry, no results found, try entering broader terms. You can also add some additional text. So let me show you how this works. USA.gov will not have results for what I just typed in, so they have configured it to say, please reach out to a contact center if you have any questions. At is on the no results page. The search page alert is a great way to put in a pardon our dust message. In here in the demo you can see the under construction message that I've put through the search page. Quickly, at the end, this activate section includes information about going live, but you don't have to worry about clicking it because it will not actually do anything. So we can come into the activate section and we provide code snippets that you can use and just copy and paste them into your page templates if you want to do that. But if you want to use your own custom search box design, please use this as a reference for what parameters are required in the search box in order for the system to be able to understand the request that you are sending. And then, this will also include -- this will be customized for each site handle. This script at the bottom allows you to use the drop-down list on your own website so you can copy it and put it, as you see here, at the bottom of your page. And then you make the change on your website and it starts to send us queries and that is how you -- very quickly -- that was not the button I wanted. The analytics for USA.gov, and we are always appreciative of our friends who let us show their data. This is what a dashboard looks like when you have traffic coming in. This is for today. The page that is getting clicked on the most today. Queries over time and then also a block that shows whether people are searching for something and not clicking on it or searching for something over here on the right. Sometimes it is down below where you see people are searching and getting the results. Oh, my gosh, my screen is not sharing. Well -- since we are nearing the end, let's -- let me give you a brief overview of analytics and everyone is welcome to reach out to us with additional questions. We report on the top queries that the site is getting, the top pages that are getting clicked on and then also we report on the pages where people were when they were looking -- when they ran a search. And we also provide monthly reports that give high-level data about different search modules and there is a section where you can submit -- you can submit a third-party tracking code for your independent Google analytics or a customer service survey and then we also have an alerting feature, which you can use to get an email if people are not getting results on a frequent query or not useful results are not clicking on them. That is the fastest I've ever done the analytics section, but please reach out if you have any questions about that. It is nice data, if I do say so myself. Let's go back. The main takeaways that we hope you will glean from this session is we do hope you talk to us about indexing and you read through the everything you need to know about indexing guide and will walk you through the process and give tips for improving the quality of your results. We hope that you set up your various search features and turn them on and dive into the analytics section to see what people are looking at on your site. Thank you very much. Do we have any additional questions that we can hit?
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Is it working now? We do have several questions. It looks like we don't have time, or we can go over.
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One of the questions is they want to know if we have a step-by-step guide to integrate? 
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