Search Done Right

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, going from tradeshow to tradeshow, so I haven’t been as obsessed as some about the latest iPhone and the updates for the older versions. I knew I would be able to cut and paste (finally). But I was pleasantly surprised this weekend when I downloaded the update and found I could search across the iPhone.

Mobile search, of course, is nothing new. Many search vendors, including Vivisimo, have offered it for years. But this is different. Now you can across everything on your iPhone – contacts, songs (including lyrics), instant messages, emails from multiple accounts, videos you’ve downloaded, you name it. Not only can you search across all your applications, but the new iPhone update also includes the ability to narrow your search to individual apps, so you can search just your email or iTunes.

I bring this up not because I’m trying to sell iPhones (Apple has spent plenty on that already). Rather, it’s yet another illustration of the power and ubiquity of search.

Here’s a silly example. My kids, Aidan and Jordan, bought me a few new CDs for Father’s Day. (Yes, I’m old-fashioned enough to still buy CDs.) One of them was a compilation Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach suites. (I told you I was old fashioned.) I downloaded it to my iPhone then started navigating through iTunes to find it. I looked under Yo-Yo, Ma and concertos. No luck. Two minutes wasted.

I have several Bach albums (no, I’m not old-fashioned enough to have Bach on LPs), and didn’t want to navigate through all of them. Of course, the album title started with Bach, so I was pretty much out of luck – until I remembered I could search. A simple search for “Yo” gave me what I was looking for in less than four seconds.

As I said, it’s a silly example. Who cares if I saved two minutes finding something for my personal use over a weekend? But what happens when we apply this same idea to the enterprise? What would thousands of minutes being saved every day mean to your organization? Over the course of a month, a quarter or a year, that time savings really adds up.

Imagine what you could do with a more efficient workforce – or a customer base that was able to find things faster on your website.

Are more efficient workers the sole ROI of search? Certainly not. But for a guy trying to finish a blog to the beautiful strains of cello music on Father’s Day, it beats anything else I can thing of.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 4:36 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.