Search Done Right

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!)

Deadly Sin #6: Brand Confusion

As site search sins go, brand confusion is one of the easiest to find and least expensive to fix. Brand confusion occurs when either the search page title or search URL string reflects the brand of the company providing the search technology versus the brand of the company whose pages site visitors are searching.

You can see this sin illustrated on the search results page of United Technologies Corporation’s website in the graphic after the jump.

Do a simple experiment: Ask yourself or a colleague who works in a large organization this question: “How often do you use a web search engine versus a search engine that is ‘behind the firewall’ (i.e., to find information only available inside your organization)?” The two answers are typically very different. In fact, most internet-savvy people use a web search engine every day. The same people rarely or never use a search engine behind the firewall. But maybe they just don’t need it?

Deadly Sin #5: Egoism

This one needs a bit of an upfront definition. Egoism is a philosophy about making personal welfare and interests your primary concern, sometimes at the expense of others. Companies can be guilty of this as well as individuals.

We can see examples of egoism in site search implementations where the company asks far too much from a site visitor who wants to search, as in the following example from the Cadillac website.

First, in order to search the Cadillac website, you have to hunt for the search function that is hidden on the bottom left of the home page (circled in red):