Search Done Right

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.

Microsoft has stated that it bought Fast to become a one-stop shop for enterprise search at the high end as well as at the low/medium end (”infrastructure search”). This is a compelling $1.2B argument that high-end search is what enterprises need, contrary to previous claims about infrastructure search being good enough.

[An alternative hypothesis is that Microsoft thinks low-end search is good enough for the enterprise and will try eventually to switch over the customer base from Fast, but wanted to immediately jump-start its play into enterprise search. If so, both Microsoft and Fast customers may well be in for a surprise.]

I believe that some purchasers of enterprise search are making a mistake, understandable as it may be, which they don’t make in other purchasing decisions: they go for point solutions which will prove inadequate soon after deployment.

A point solution solves an immediate, specific need. Now, what could be wrong with that??

Let’s consider point solutions in daily life that few people would find satisfactory:

• Starting work at a company that will go out of business shortly.
• Buying a thumb drive that only stores 5Mb because it will store your current PPT presentation. But it won’t store three of them.