Search Done Right

As my whirlwind conference travels continue, I attended the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit last week in Orlando. I was most interested to hear what Whit Andrews had to say on search. In May, he was quoted advising clients who were looking for low-cost information access solutions to consider federation. I was curious to hear what he had to say on the topic during his live presentation.

Andrews began by claiming that search has been a failure and that today workers spend more than five hours a week just trying to find information. He cited a number of reasons outlined for this, but the two dominant themes were:

1)     Companies are not enabling search for most of their content, which means employees are searching for information that doesn’t even exist in the search result set.

2)     Search has been impersonal with a list of one to 10 results. A good search solution should know the searcher and provide tools to navigate results based on his/her profile and preferences to create a conversation. (I’ll discuss this more in my next blog post.)

I completely agree with Andrews as these are two common complaints I hear from companies. In the past, legacy search solutions have done little more than search websites and file shares presenting a one-dimensional list of results. However, he then came out with this strong statement: “Search has stopped getting better, and the only ways to fix it are federation and conversation.”

I would vociferously argue that this is not true. Federation is a great tool to use with sources that cannot be indexed or crawled. In fact, during his talk Andrews even highlighted a Vivisimo customer, the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library (HAM), as a success story around federation. For HAM, federation was the only option because it was looking to provide a single access point for all outside licensed content. With outside content, it is impossible to crawl and index the information, so federation is the only way to access information. I would argue, though, that this is not always the case for internal resources.

I have seen organizations attempt to federate larger content repositories, (Documentum, SharePoint, SAP, etc.) but they are often disappointed by the results. Yes, it might save some licensing dollars but it doesn’t deliver the same value. When federating internal repositories, there is a lot of complexity around saving user credentials, determining whether a system will allow for multiple users to be logged in at once, determining the type of data that is returned and its structure, adjusting relevancy around combining results and more. Trying to solve these challenges often creates a more costly and less effective solution. While Andrews mentioned that point, I would argue though that, not only does it return less value, but it often isn’t a feasible solution. Federation is like taking a painkiller – it might reduce the pain for a short time but it is only hiding the true pain. And when the pain returns, it can be worse than when it first started.

I would challenge Andrews (and did during a later meeting) that search is getting better. I agree that connectivity is one of the most challenging aspects of search to get right, but we are seeing success from our customers. Procter & Gamble spoke at the conference about its enterprise search solution powered by Vivisimo Velocity. It claimed that before Velocity the company was only searching about half of all of its information. Since then, the amount of data being searched has drastically increased along with the number of users. See a recent blog post for more details on the presentation.

Stay tuned for the second part of this posting, when I discuss personalized search.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 2:19 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.