Search Done Right

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?

Then ask a second question:“How do you exchange and/or refer to information inside versus outside the firewall?” If I want to learn about a certain subject on the internet, my first step will not be to call or email the most knowledgeable person in my entourage. It will likely be a web search. Only after doing my homework (my own research), will I interact with people (and often find the right people to interact with). Inside the firewall, the picture is completely different. Finding information on your own is almost impossible, so I will likely call or email one of my colleagues (who may not necessarily be the most knowledgeable), starting a chain of emails, interactions, and disturbances to find the right person.

Similarly, once I find a knowledgeable person, the exchange of information is completely different. On the web, there is an expectation that this information will be found in the common repository. “Just do a search for X” is a popular answer to many forum posts. Inside the firewall, the standard is, “Email me the document,” duplicating the information and making it unnecessary to share it more broadly.

Outside the firewall, search has allowed efficient collaboration and the exchange of valuable information between people with absolutely no prior connection. This allows anybody to mine and leverage collective wisdom and creates an incentive to augment it. Inside the firewall, where interests are much closer and exchanges could be even more valuable, such interactions through search have not happened. People need search, yet they don’t use it at all.

A third question is “Why?” Why aren’t people using search behind the firewall? This question usually produces one of the following answers:

• “There is no search engine,” or, more often than not, people don’t know that there is one (or even more than one).
• “Searches return junk,” meaning that bad quality makes the search engines useless.
• “I don’t know where to search,” meaning the information is in too many silos.

How can this search gap be filled? To answer this question, let’s go back in history.

Remember 1998? At that time, search was known, but it was a dispensable tool, not a big deal. AltaVista was moving into the portal business because of the lukewarm prospects of search. Enter Google. The service was clean, easy to use, and had an intuitive interface that gave the impression of being able to find the needle in the haystack. Google was game changing. It made search an indispensable tool of everyday internet life.

In other words, what you need is a Google behind the firewall.” Now, a “Google behind the firewall” is not actually Google behind the firewall. The Google enterprise appliance has been around for many years, but it gives a false sense of solving the issue. Sure, it was better than Verity and the like, but it did not significantly increase the usage of search. The reason? The appliance is designed to grab the easily accessible information, not the critical information. It relies on a static, web-based relevance model, and it relies on only relevance with low emphasis on more advanced user experience. It also does not come with the 1,000 Ph.D.s to constantly increase coverage, relevance, and usability that you see on Google.

So what is a “Google behind the firewall”? First, you obviously need a search engine, but you need it to be good enough to start a virtuous circle. Like Google in 1998, good enough means a leap in search experience: a leap in coverage, findability, and usability.

Next week, I’ll address how to leap ahead in coverage, findability and usability.

Tags: behind the firewall, search engine, search experience

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 1:46 pm 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.