Search Done Right

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.

After a long hiatus and more than a few comments reminding me that I am long overdue for the rest of this series, here is number four in the series of seven deadly sins of site search.

Deadly Sin #4: Complexity

Of all of the bad ideas with good intentions in search, omnipotence is one of the worst. Omnipotent search is the idea that the search engine will intuitively understand what the searcher is looking for and respond by answering a “question.” It typically doesn’t work well on corporate sites, except for specialized technical customer support sections.

As an entrepreneur and CEO, I am often asked by interviewees, interviewers, or acquaintances what keeps me up at night. Instead, I wish people would more often ask: What keeps me fired up during the day?

What fires me up is the same as what fires up everyone else in Vivisimo and in search: the world of online information is transforming utterly—for the better—how people learn and discover and profit from information.

Deadly Sin #3: Complexity

In my previous posts on the seven deadly sins of site search, we’ve addressed the sins of omission (no site search) and apathy (poor site search). Today we tackle one that often occurs when a company is trying its best to help visitors find information by offering multiple search engines. For every large company out there that has no site search box, there is another that will have multiple search boxes.

Six months ago, I was one of these guys who never carried around their cell phone. Today, my office is calling me a smartphone addict because I email them while vacationing off in the Caribbean in tropical paradise.

A few times in the past I tried to use PDAs but they always ended back in their box after a few days of fiddling with them. What made a difference this time? Three things: a mobile device (my Motorola Q is even lighter and slimmer than my previous phone), a fast internet connection and a usable web browser. Very quickly I realized that I could use my smartphone for 90% of the tasks I did from my laptop while carrying less than 5% of the weight.

Deadly Sin #2: Apathy

Apathy is probably the most common of the site search “sins” you will run across on large corporate websites. It is also one of the biggest reasons why users may bypass your site search completely and instead conduct the same query using one of the popular web search engines.

Apathy occurs when a company invests in a search engine to crawl its website, places a search box in a prominent place on the home page and then doesn’t check to see how well it functions. Judging from the poor or even abysmal results many site search engines produce, few are testing the quality of their site’s search results.