Search Done Right

Providing useful search results is often not just a matter of displaying textual content but has grown to include graphics, audio, video and more recently mapped views of search results. This is useful for applications that focus on specific location information such as office branches and retail outlets in addition to applications centered on geographic regions. This feature is often referred to as geomapping, which is the presentation of data in digital maps.

One of the key aspects to presenting accurate and relevant search results is recognizing the user’s intent. A search for “IRA” on a financial services website may result in personal individual retirement account details as well as information about how to open an IRA or roll money over from a 401(k). A search for “cell” on Google may be a query related to cellular phones or it may be biology related.

As I was driving through my hometown of Boston last night, I was reminded why it is called the city of five seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter and pothole. When you don’t invest in infrastructure, you are going to pay sooner or later.

The same is true for corporations. While most of them don’t have to worry about paving streets and repairing major bridges, they have made a significant investment in information. Given that there is no government-subsidized economic stimulus package to upgrade technology infrastructure, IT organizations instead face the reality of declining IT budgets combined with continued pressure to demonstrate improvements. The answer is enterprise search, which allows a broad base of users to easily discover and navigate information across numerous internal and external sources. Enterprise search technology has now matured into an application that is both low risk and easy to deploy.