Search Done Right

Nice interview of search industry commentator Steven Arnold in Government Computer News. I know and like Mr. Arnold and find his conference talks fun and informative. This remark of his is close to the mark:

This has been a time when people are realizing that enterprise search doesn’t work. Folks with enterprise search systems are really on the lookout for technologies that make search more useful for the users.

Right. If enterprise search doesn’t make users more productive, then what’s the point? But his brush paints too broadly. Enterprise search can and does work, and there are actually independent experts who test products very closely and conclude that enterprise search does work.

For example, Mick Heck of InfoWorld published his results of in-house tests of the enterprise search products of Google & ISYS, exalead and Siderean, and Vivisimo based on his personal, honest-to-goodness deployment of these products, setting a gold standard for careful analysis.

But Steve’s two other remarks puzzle me …

Take a real-life example: You and your significant other go to England and she says on the way home, “I loved that jumper that I saw at Harrods.”

So, if you’re like me you don’t have any clue about what she’s talking about. So now I go to a search system, like at Neiman Marcus Online or Overstock.com, and type in the word “jumper.” What I get back is not that sweater that she saw in Harrods. I get stuff back unrelated to that idea. And that is a very common problem.

So, search for jumper/sweater, lift/elevator, and rubber/eraser in UK/US and you get different results. But why not just search the Harrods enterprise site, which gives eight rather nice jumpers (I like the Red Ribbon)? Why would you search Neiman Marcus if you saw it at Harrods?

In response to Joab Jackon’s later question:

GCN: Any thoughts on the battle between the two premier U.S.-government-focused search engines, FirstGov and Google U.S. Government search?

Steve focuses on back-end details such as which crawl is broader or deeper and does not at all address “technologies that make search more useful for the users” which FirstGov is chock full of, namely:

• spotlights of high-value information such as FAQs and federal forms (try searching for passport)
• indexing information from scattered agencies into a single spotlighted entry (ford mustang - note fuel economy and safety information at the top)
• selective federated search of USAjobs.gov when queries seem relevant (college student interns)
• clustering of the top 100+ search results into the main topics
• re-clustering not by topics but by federal agency
• opportunistic insertion of matching images with a slider-based interface (iwo jima)
• ‘more from’ feature that gets more results from the agency relating to a search result
• preview feature that opens the search result within a small area on the same page

Judging a search service without evaluating the user experience is like judging an architectural work based on the gargoyles in the attic while ignoring how it impacts human work and play. It’s common, and it’s easy, but it’s not good practice.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 9:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.