What Is Intranet Search and Why Is It Important?

At the core of your organization’s workplace functions is an intranet. In today’s hybrid working environments, where anyone can work from anywhere, an effective intranet is an essential part of standard workplace solutions.

Not to be confused with the internet, an intranet is a private internal network where company information and data can be accessed. Many different workplace applications can be a part of your intranet to facilitate workplace communication and organization.

Traditionally, intranets have been set in outdated formats, and with an extensive amount of information that can be difficult to hunt through. As a result, having helpful intranet search is essential to increase workplace productivity and engagement for your employees.

The Benefits of Intranet Search

Workplace Engagement Increases

More likely than not, your organization’s intranet and internal databases contain an abundance of documents and information. No one wants to scour through many different documents to find a unique piece of content. Doing so wastes time and ultimately hinders employee productivity.

With an AI-driven intranet search solution, it is easy to manage mass amounts of information and make it accessible with powerful search capabilities and the proper permissions. Employees spend less time looking for the information and more time actually using it.

Finding the right information

Search result relevance is a must-have for intranet search platforms to support employee productivity. If your employees type in a search term and receive a variety of documents that are not useful to them, they waste time digging through irrelevant content and retyping queries in the hopes that one will eventually bring up what they’re looking for.

An effective intranet platform will provide both relevant results and suggest related search terms that could provide additional, relevant information.

Connecting the right person to the right information

Intranet security is also important to consider. Not all users should have access to all documents in your intranet. A powerful search platform will enable you to control what users have access to what documents and tools, and will only show results that each user has permission to view. Listing a document in results that a searcher doesn’t have access to is a situation bound to cause trouble and frustration.

How do you know your intranet is working?

The ability to measure overall success and KPIs will show you what aspects of your intranet (and intranet search) are working, and what needs attention. KPIs will indicate what content is most engaging and what content that might need some work.

Analytics will also be able to reveal how many times employees landed on a “no results” search page, allowing you to improve your intranet search. Search queries without results leave employees at a dead end with no obvious direction to turn. By fixing queries that don’t have results, employees more quickly reach the destination in their search journey.
By monitoring intranet search analytics, you’ll be able to save employees time and your organization money.

Why is good intranet search so important?

Over the last decade, the expectations of finding information with a quick search have drastically changed. Now, with mobile devices, we can quickly find information wherever we are whenever. As consumers, our devices start to personalize our feeds and recommend new products and services we might be interested in keeping us tied to our mobile devices for longer. Which is essentially the goal: engagement.

Being able to bring this consumer-like experience to the workplace through an effective intranet that personalizes feeds and recommends content can improve employee engagement and make it easier for employees to do their jobs.

Flexibility within devices is also important to consider, it’s easy to stay hooked to our devices because they’re convenient. Intranets should be compatible with mobile because workplace applications should be convenient to access when employees are on the go.

Today’s work environments consist of frequent virtual calls and employees working from the comfort of their homes. With fewer in-person meetings and interactions, intranets, and intranet searches are vital to make sure everyone stays well-informed and connected to the information they need.

Lucidworks can help take your organization’s intranet search to the next level. Improve your employees’ experience and lower overhead costs by getting in touch with us today.