Search Done Right

An interesting conversation has emerged across the blogs this week regarding how well—or not—enterprise search solutions perform at finding information to the satisfaction of the individual user within the confines of an organization.

The ball got rolling when Udi Manber, a vice president of engineering at Google said that his company used its own solution for internal search, adding: “It’s not that good—I’m complaining about it.” (Ouch. Well at least he has those great cafeterias!)

Later in the same article, Nitin Mangtani, Google’s lead product manager for the Google Search Appliance (GSA) defended the company’s enterprise product by saying, “Recent updates to the GSA software improves the relevancy of its results.” Magtani then said of the GSA interface…“what happens now works. You type in two words, click and you’re done. You can’t beat that.”

The first reaction to Manbar’s unhappiness was from industry pundit Steve Arnold, who seized upon Manber’s comments to once again don the Cassandrian mantle of doom regarding the search industry, noting for what seems like the umpteenth time that “enterprise search is leaving many users dissatisfied.” Once that was out of the way, Arnold had an interesting observation, “An employee needs information to perform work. Problem is that “work” is somewhat fluid. Some employees need to answer a customer’s question about an invoice. That’s one type of search. Other employees need to get a document signed and want a police style “where is she” service. That’s another type of search. Other employees don’t search at all. These folks are sitting in a meeting and need information pushed to them germane to the task at hand.”

The next reaction came from Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca who had a thoughtful response worth reading in its entirety regarding Google’s quandary. I found his statement—“the information access tool does not presume to know exactly what you meant or what you want, but instead works with you to establish this understanding through dialogue”—to be particularly relevant to the issue of enterprise search user satisfaction that Vivisimo also has been working hard to address.

What both Arnold and Tunkelang are pointing out, using different words, is that search engines cannot be expected to adequately guess the user’s intent when a query is entered or assume the context of that query. And this is a big point of distinction between web search and enterprise search. Context matters. And so does the ability to find the right information. On the web, if you are searching for like-minded fans of a favorite television show and you get way more or less than you need or want, so what. It really doesn’t matter—life goes on. But if you’re looking for a specific piece of information to put into a presentation for work and can’t find it, it matters—a lot. Same goes for the research results in another division that your enterprise search may have missed that cause you to duplicate work and add weeks to completing your project.

Knowing that it is near impossible for a search engine to guess the intent of a searcher, the answer is to provide users with tools so they can define their intent upfront. Vivisimo just introduced Velocity 7, which gives users the ability to do just this—explicitly define their intent. For example, if a user is looking for a very specific piece of information or a particular document, they are given the option to narrow their query by being presented with specific examples to check to refine their search. Ten minutes later, that same user may now be searching for material for a project but have no idea of what information is available or what other terms may be used to describe what they are looking for and now have the option to broaden their search by checking related terms or concepts suggested by the search engine.

Sound complicated? It’s not. See the interface below for an easy-to-use UI to make queries more precise or broader for greater recall. While Google’s crusade to keep the UI uncluttered makes sense on the web (particularly when you need to leave room for ads), it limits the beneficial options that could make its employees more productive (and happier) within its own four walls.

Tags: Endeca, enterprise search, Google, information access, search engine, search industry, user intent, Velocity 7

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 2:03 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.