Search Done Right

I once joked with a boss of mine that everything bought and sold by businesses can be boiled down to having just one of two benefits—it either saves you money or makes you money. Last Monday, I was reminded of this conversation while sitting on a panel, “Enterprise Search: Running Your Own Search Engine”, with a few other folks at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. One of the panelists, Bill French, CTO from Myst Technology Partners, brought up statistics from IDC in his presentation, observing that employees may spend up to two hours a day searching for information, to illustrate the point of why enterprise search is so critical. Now these are not new numbers, they are the same figures that everyone in the industry has bandied about for quite some time as the reason d’etre for search—if enterprise search solutions can save each employee x amount of time, then multiply x by y (employee hourly salary) to get the theoretical dollar savings per employee search can provide. This is the “saves you money” argument.

In my last post, The Search Gap – Part 1, I discussed the enormous gap between web search and “behind the firewall” search—i.e enterprise search. Now, as promised, I’ll lay out how you can bridge the search gap in three critical areas—coverage, findability and usability.

Deadly Sin #6: Brand Confusion

As site search sins go, brand confusion is one of the easiest to find and least expensive to fix. Brand confusion occurs when either the search page title or search URL string reflects the brand of the company providing the search technology versus the brand of the company whose pages site visitors are searching.

You can see this sin illustrated on the search results page of United Technologies Corporation’s website in the graphic after the jump.

Do a simple experiment: Ask yourself or a colleague who works in a large organization this question: “How often do you use a web search engine versus a search engine that is ‘behind the firewall’ (i.e., to find information only available inside your organization)?” The two answers are typically very different. In fact, most internet-savvy people use a web search engine every day. The same people rarely or never use a search engine behind the firewall. But maybe they just don’t need it?

Deadly Sin #5: Egoism

This one needs a bit of an upfront definition. Egoism is a philosophy about making personal welfare and interests your primary concern, sometimes at the expense of others. Companies can be guilty of this as well as individuals.

We can see examples of egoism in site search implementations where the company asks far too much from a site visitor who wants to search, as in the following example from the Cadillac website.

First, in order to search the Cadillac website, you have to hunt for the search function that is hidden on the bottom left of the home page (circled in red):

Enterprise search - or search within businesses - is a decade behind web search in terms of usage. Interesting questions are why? and whither? - what’s the trend?

There is roughly one web search per person per day in the U.S., counting the web searches at Google, Yahoo, Live, etc., but excluding searches at eBay, YouTube, CMU.edu, WashPost.com, USA.gov and the like. The analogue in business is searches done on the general intranet search, not at point solutions like Outlook search, desktop search, single-repository search, and so on. Our experience is that daily, general intranet searches lag web searches by orders of magnitude.

Vivisimo introduced high-quality text clustering into the search engine market in the year 2000, after a couple of years of computer science research on new algorithms by the founders at Carnegie Mellon. The research breakthrough was labelling the clusters, i.e, grouping search results into folder topics. Before that breakthrough, search result clusters had poor labels and so the technology was unusable. The technology was first demonstrated on a university website and later at vivisimo.com, with excellent reviews.

Microsoft has stated that it bought Fast to become a one-stop shop for enterprise search at the high end as well as at the low/medium end (”infrastructure search”). This is a compelling $1.2B argument that high-end search is what enterprises need, contrary to previous claims about infrastructure search being good enough.

[An alternative hypothesis is that Microsoft thinks low-end search is good enough for the enterprise and will try eventually to switch over the customer base from Fast, but wanted to immediately jump-start its play into enterprise search. If so, both Microsoft and Fast customers may well be in for a surprise.]

I believe that some purchasers of enterprise search are making a mistake, understandable as it may be, which they don’t make in other purchasing decisions: they go for point solutions which will prove inadequate soon after deployment.

A point solution solves an immediate, specific need. Now, what could be wrong with that??

Let’s consider point solutions in daily life that few people would find satisfactory:

• Starting work at a company that will go out of business shortly.
• Buying a thumb drive that only stores 5Mb because it will store your current PPT presentation. But it won’t store three of them.

I’m back in the office after a few weeks on the road presenting at seminars and trade shows where I was showing off the new social search capabilities in Velocity 6.0. The most common question I heard was about tagging search results with keywords - would employees really take the time to tag information?

Tony Byrne of CMS Watch addressed this issue in a recent post and discussed two relevant problems associated with enterprise tagging. The first is that many users can’t tag because they haven’t been given easy-to-use tools in order to do so (filling in 5 or more required metadata fields in a content management system doesn’t count as easy). The second problem is that of users who won’t tag - here Tony gives some good advice about creating incentives along with an institutional emphasis on organizing digital information.