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.

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.