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.

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.