Search Done Right

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.

1. Coverage

Search needs to aim at being universal. Like Google outside the firewall, you should aim to organize and make accessible through search all information in your organization. You cannot expect your users to figure out where to search before actually doing a search. This is also key to raising expectations. When users start trusting the engine and can’t find information, they will request that the information be made accessible and searchable, creating an incentive to share information. In most organizations, increasing coverage means making secure content searchable across multiple repositories; secured content is more often than not the most valuable. You’ll need a search technology that’s able to tackle difficult and diverse connectivity, security, and data normalization issues in a minimum deployment time.

2. Findability

Findability is not just synonymous with relevance. Behind the firewall, there is no magical page rank or popularity metric. Clustering, metadata navigation, spotlighting, personalization, and source-dependent relevance formulas are key to raising findability across a wide range of information sources to an acceptable level. Look for search technology that provides these advanced tools out of the box and makes them easy to deploy (this is tied closely to the connectivity issue, as it requires the ability to leverage implicit and explicit metadata in the different repositories).

3. Usability

The web has created high standards for usability; enterprise applications need to match and even surpass that standard. Pay attention to little details: breadcrumbs, tabs, default syntax, overall look and feel, and UI personalization. Look for a search technology that provides a simple, weblike look and feel with well-integrated and well thought-out advanced features.

Only after resolving coverage, findability, and usability issues will you be able to break the vicious circle—low quality, low usage, low IT priority, low quality—and turn it into a virtuous circle—higher usage, raised user expectations, higher IT focus, and better search.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 12:26 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.