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.

For years now, people with a vested interest in information access—search vendors, librarians and other knowledge management professionals—have debated whether taxonomies will survive or if technologies like search eliminate the need for them.

I’ve been working in the enterprise search space for a number of years—not as long as some, but long enough to have heard many iterations of this debate. One version is, “Will auto-classification and semantic search technologies become sophisticated enough to replace taxonomies?” Another version transforms the question to, “Can folksonomies created by users via tagging replace the need for structured taxonomies?”