July 17, 2024 - Updates, priorities of the week

Back to GC Web Priorities Meetings - Réunions des Priorités Web du GC

Meeting information

Agenda

1. Updates

2. Roundtable

Notes and action item

Updates

DTO

• We noticed IRCC has added Sign in to their landing page, way to go and nice to see it starting to roll out

PCO

• Thanks to everyone for helping with Dogs on vacation content for CFIA
• Thanks for supporting on the file for new content for wildfires

Principle Publisher

• The Share this page widget has been removed from AEM, we ask the non AEM teams to follow suit within month please
• Rational: We looked at the numbers and it was hardly ever used, also that functionality is built into a lot of browsers

CFIA - Lessons learned from New dog cross-border regulations

• A lot of our work deals with import/export issues
• Recently there were changes to requirements to bring your dog into the US on vacation
• The attention meant we had to interact with media more than usual
• Observations from this recent work:
  1. Good idea to meet with your partners at the beginning of the exercise, for instance we met with PCO, good to have backing from the Centre
  2. We need more support from management to harness the power of plain language to communicate about regulations/laws
  3. We would love to be part of the conversation about content design communication checklists and templates
     • Would be good to meet with others to talk about lessons learned
  4. We relied a lot on Canada.ca design for our content for expertise how to organize things

Principle Publisher - Migration to a new search solution

• GC search is a common and shared search service provided by PP
• Indexes most publicly available GC web pages, 4.6 million searches a month
• We work with departments to configure the search to their needs
• New solution is now live, started on Jun 11, 2024
• New vendor is Coveo Solutions, a Quebec based company
• We worked to index 125 websites, roughly 2.9 million pages, built from scratch

Future of search

• New system provides a starting point to allow GC Search to grow
• Lays the foundation for: AI machine learning and analytics

Input from Conveo

• Search function works on a “learned” basis, based on input from users
• For example, will bring up documents that are clicked often, based on particular searches, this is an example of machine learning
• Uses “automated answering”
• Also uses smart snippet, copy and pastes answers from relevant documents, similar to AI, but has the advantage that GOC writes the answers which gives us more control
• We can work with metadata to improve searches, can work with you to determine how to best use and write metadata

Questions

Q: How does a smart snippet work?

Aː Our smart snippet function looks at the html code on the page to guess which snippet is the best answer to the question. We can also customize that further, and work with you to pick the best snippet.

Q: How do we manage promoting search terms at the whole of GOC level?

A: This is an issue that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the new search tool. We are looking at issues such as putting time limits on boosting terms.

DTO: This is something that the Search Working Group will be looking at.

Q: Does metadata need to be visible on source code? Talking about metadata in AEM but not in the source code.

A: Strictly speaking no it doesn’t need to be visible in source code. There are ways, but for that specific case, we will have to investigate.

Q: For the time being do we work on metadata the same way?

A: Yes, for now you don’t have to change anything.

Q: Can we get view access to the dashboards?

A: We have very detailed analytics about the searches, at this time they are accessible only to Coveo, because there’s some expertise in reading the dashboard. But this could evolve so that departments could have access to them over time. Whether it be full access or some key indicators, we will discuss this.

Q: Is it possible even to have minimal access to dashboards?

A: It wasn’t part of the initial contract, but there seems to be high interest and we will discuss it.

Input from Service Canada Analytics team: Remember that there’s also a lot of analytical info available in Adobe Analytics and we will also be talking with Conveo to see what we can make available. We need to make sure also that both systems of Analytics are complementary, and not muddy the waters.