Search Done Right

Last week, I attended the Enterprise Search Summit in New York City. By the end of the show, I could not help but feel bad for the attendees who have not yet implemented search. If I were evaluating enterprise search for my organization, I would have walked out of the event more lost than when I started. All week I heard repetitive pitches from vendors, case studies that start to blur and a feedback from a mix of users – both satisfied and unsatisfied. With so much noise, I couldn’t help but wonder how an attendee was supposed to walk away with a clear plan for evaluating and implementing search.

Many sessions focused on the tactical – here was the problem, here’s how we evaluated and here’s the final product.  During each session a list of features would be rattled off from integrating a taxonomy, to creating spotlights – all the way to integrating BI-like elements. But few focused on the heart of the issue: What problem is your organization trying to solve with search? Before an organization can even select a search solution, it needs to understand the problem it is trying to solve. It needs to identify:

• Who is your audience? 
• What content is being searched?
• How does your audience interact with the content?
• How does your audience interact with one another?

Until these questions are answered, you can’t begin to understand which solution is best for your organization. It is critical to understand what problems you are trying to solve so that you can select the right vendor with the right feature set and level of support.

I would be interested hearing from others who attended ESS. Did you find the sessions valuable? Were you able to make sense of the noise?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 6:00 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.