Search Done Right

Smart and experienced IT executives know they can’t ignore the different styles of categorization their end users demand when searching. To increase discovery, users wish to navigate through a search result using faceted or structured navigation. Some users want dynamic categorization – clustering – while others refuse to trust anything that is not pre-defined within a taxonomy structure. Many organizations fail to meet the challenge of accommodating these competing search strategies, alienating one group or another.

Brian Babineau of ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group) recently published a research brief on enterprise search, including many statistics, charts and graphs that will help organizations produce a strong business case to executive management on the need to gain control of information.

He also makes one of the clearest and most compelling arguments for search that I’ve seen lately:

An interesting conversation has emerged across the blogs this week regarding how well—or not—enterprise search solutions perform at finding information to the satisfaction of the individual user within the confines of an organization.

The ball got rolling when Udi Manber, a vice president of engineering at Google said that his company used its own solution for internal search, adding: “It’s not that good—I’m complaining about it.” (Ouch. Well at least he has those great cafeterias!)

I once joked with a boss of mine that everything bought and sold by businesses can be boiled down to having just one of two benefits—it either saves you money or makes you money. Last Monday, I was reminded of this conversation while sitting on a panel, “Enterprise Search: Running Your Own Search Engine”, with a few other folks at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. One of the panelists, Bill French, CTO from Myst Technology Partners, brought up statistics from IDC in his presentation, observing that employees may spend up to two hours a day searching for information, to illustrate the point of why enterprise search is so critical. Now these are not new numbers, they are the same figures that everyone in the industry has bandied about for quite some time as the reason d’etre for search—if enterprise search solutions can save each employee x amount of time, then multiply x by y (employee hourly salary) to get the theoretical dollar savings per employee search can provide. This is the “saves you money” argument.

Enterprise search – or search within businesses – is a decade behind web search in terms of usage. Interesting questions are why? and whither? – what’s the trend?

There is roughly one web search per person per day in the U.S., counting the web searches at Google, Yahoo, Live, etc., but excluding searches at eBay, YouTube, CMU.edu, WashPost.com, USA.gov and the like. The analogue in business is searches done on the general intranet search, not at point solutions like Outlook search, desktop search, single-repository search, and so on. Our experience is that daily, general intranet searches lag web searches by orders of magnitude.