Search Done Right

Google just announced some improvements to its search appliance (“New Google Search Appliance Connectors“, “Compare enterprise search relevance using Side-by-Side in Enterprise Labs“). As always with the appliance announcements it’s very interesting to read between the lines. The experimental side-by-side feature looks cool but what really caught my attention is the mention that their SharePoint connector now supports “bulk authorization“. Now, wait, bulk authorization? Didn’t Google just announce support for early binding?

Every organization employs individuals, whose main responsibility is gathering, evaluating, creating and sharing knowledge throughout their organization.  They are the knowledge workers.  Within consulting companies the knowledge worker makes up around 90% of the workforce, in manufacturing they might comprise 30-40% of the overall workforce.  Regardless of the percentage, there is always an initiative around knowledge workers to better understand their role and increase their overall utilization.

I grew up in Zambia, a developing country with limited resources. Yet I was fortunate enough to attend an international school before heading to the United States to receive a world-class education.

With the university’s access to a multitude of online data repositories, it was easy to find what I was looking for. The university subscribed to many information sources and made them available to students, whether they were preparing papers or presentations or just wanting to broaden their horizons. Sometimes those searches took a while because multiple data repositories had to be searched separately. But with advancements in search technologies over the last 10 years, we now have tools to help us find solutions and reach conclusions much quicker.

In the early days of the Automobile Age, Henry Ford famously quipped, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” In today’s Information Age, that’s like saying anyone looking for information can have any results as long as they are ranked in a simple list. Hogwash!

Nothing against lists, but as far as information representation goes, lists are just the beginning of what’s possible for presenting information in response to a query, whether it be explicit (e.g. in response to a search query) or implicit (e.g. dynamically loaded content). Depending on the type of information being presented, lists may or may not be the most clear and effective way to present the answers you are seeking.

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.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a hot topic these days. SEO consultants are paid well for their expertise in telling a company how to improve its web search engine ranking. A high rank often means more traffic, which means more business, which means more money.

However, SEO consultants focus primarily on the World Wide Web. After all, it’s only the public that needs to find information on the company’s website, right?

Wrong. This fact is well established. Vivísimo and other vendors entered the enterprise search market years ago and their growing number of clients shows that employees need to find data within the company’s intranet sites and storage networks using a unified, easy-to-use interface.

I finished up my spring tradeshow season at Enterprise 2.0 this week in Boston. The event is unlike many others I attended this year because much of the technology being discussed is still in its infancy. Instead of listening to debates on best practices for portal or document management rollouts, I was hearing about the latest features around communities, micro-blogs and avatars. The exhibit hall floor was an interesting hybrid of traditional software vendors (Microsoft, IBM, EMC, etc.) with new and emerging organizations (Telligent, Altassian, Jive, etc.) 

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.

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, I was at the Gartner Portal Content and Collaboration conference last week and was reflecting on some of the points Gartner’s Whit Andrews mentioned during his discussion. Most of the presentation was around the need for improved federation and conversation within search. I had some arguments against federation as a be-all end-all search solution, but agree with him that conversation is a must in delivering better search within enterprises.

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: