Finding the Search Sweet Spot: Strategies for Implementing the Right Search Engine for Your Organization

Having the right information at our fingertips is essential for making business decisions. Whether it’s in the form of e-mail, text documents or multimedia files, we rely on information to gain insight into key competitors, a given market, our customers and our companies. We make purchasing decisions based on information. Often before searching our own PCs or company databases, we turn to the Web for information more and more. That’s because enterprise search, that is, search inside a business, has become too difficult.

This challenge is mainly due to the recent explosion of "unstructured" data, such as e-mails, memos, instant messages, reports, surveys and presentations. In fact, independent research firm IDC estimates that this type of data represents more than 80 percent of the data within an organization.

As a result, it’s become incredibly challenging to pinpoint relevant information needed to make business decisions. Employees have to draw upon countless sources and databases, both inside and outside the organization, just to find what they are looking for. This process of searching for information can become frustrating, especially since many people don’t know exactly what it is they are searching for at the onset of the process.

To help quantify that frustration, IDC also estimates that the average employee spends 3.5 hours a week on searches that fail to locate the desired information, and an additional three hours recreating content that may already be stored within the enterprise.

We all possess the ability to search smarter and to search easier. If it didn’t have a powerful engine would you buy a shiny new, sleek sports car? The same thinking can be applied to choosing search software.

Following are seven golden rules to help you search better and find the right search engine for your business in the process:

Search should begin with your desktop

All searches begin from your desktop no matter what you’re searching for – it’s the search home base. The growth of unstructured data has naturally transformed the corporate desktop into the key portal to access data within the organization in recent years. Dozens of vendors, both small and large have released products for both business and consumer use with this heightened awareness around desktop search. Consider the following to help determine and evaluate which desktop search solution is right for you and your organization:

• Does the solution respect the existing security policies within your organization? Does it respect user privacy?
• Is there a range of advanced search features available? Is it easy-to-use for both novice and power users?
• Will your IT administrator be able to set access policies or manage updates and deploy the software from a single console?
• Does the solution offer support for a variety of e-mail programs? Can it index the content within your organization?

Search the way you think – by serendipity

There are dozens of free Web search engines and desktop search tools available to consumers on the Internet. They may not be appropriate for business-related searches within the enterprise just because they are accessible. Consumers have realized how easy it can be to explore content on the Web thanks to popular Web search engines. But sometimes getting a simple list of results can be too simplistic for business-related search queries in that they spit back a list of results – a list that is usually abandoned if the right result isn’t in the top three spots. Search engines should mimic the way people think. The reality is that in most cases, a thought sparks a related thought that eventually leads you to the right result or answer, all by serendipity.

Business vs. consumer search – finding the search “sweet spot”

Enterprise search is different from Web search. Enterprise search refers to accessing information within an organization – everything from directories and databases to Intranet Web sites to the desktop, while Internet or Web search is the process of searching for content indexed on the World Wide Web. There isn’t an effective, easy-to-use search tool available so employees often overlook the amount of information available to them. They end up recreating content that may have been already available internally because employees to turn to the Web for information.

Web search plays a distinct role in business and how we work. Of course, the answers don’t always lie within the organization. While consumer search engines are easy to use and free, but “too simplistic” for business use, enterprise search has gained a reputation for being complex and expensive over the years. The reality is that many CIOs end up spending anywhere from two to ten times the cost of the software in professional services to make the solution useful. Integration is a challenge because some search solutions are application platforms rather than actual products. Additionally, taxonomy projects, which are mandatory for some scenarios, are incredibly time consuming and costly, adding months to your deployment schedule and negatively impacting your ROI. The search “sweet spot” is the middle ground between these two schools of thought. Exalead has integrated Web search into its enterprise search products to allow users greater productivity and flexibility, for example.

You don’t have to be a librarian to use advanced search

Boolean, for many of you, conjures up images of a small flavor cube. Boolean refers to a search method named for George Boole, a British mathematician, in the information world. The idea behind Boolean search is that you can generate more relevant results by adding a few simple words (AND, OR, NOT) to your query. These "operators" help find information based on the relationship between content (cats NOT kittens; cats AND kittens). You don’t have to be a librarian to effectively use these tools as there are many other advanced search options available today to help pinpoint the right information.

Today’s Web and enterprise search engines offer a basic range of advanced features, while others, like Exalead, offer unique search capabilities. Imagine searching for an e-mail from a client in Tokyo without knowing how to spell his name. You can try a proximity search to return more relevant results or you can search phonetically (“sounds like”) and receive highly accurate results. You can search for a document that contains “Volvo” within five words of “safe,” for example. You may not think you’ll ever need these features, but you won’t look back once you learn how to use them. Further, you can use the same syntax for your Web searches with exalead.com.

A search engine should respect your privacy & security

Many of you have probably downloaded a free desktop search product (or two) on your PC. But did you know that you may be putting you and your organization at risk? Some desktop search tools pose serious security threats. Some programs keep cached versions of recently visited files that have been deleted or older documents, for example. Your data may be exposed by some desktop search tools that connect to the Internet without you knowing. Further, consumer desktop search tools don’t allow administrators to set fine-grained security policies to control what content is indexed and assign user privileges. Choose a solution that gives you the greatest control when evaluating an enterprise search product for your organization. Make sure the technology doesn’t put your employees at risk and that it can be customized, managed and centrally installed.

The key to searching easier is integration

While the current market offers many different products designed to address enterprise and desktop search, consider a solution that will offer users a single point of access to information, whether it resides on a data silo on the other side of the globe, the company Intranet or on one’s PC. Forcing users to learn separate tools to search different data repositories will only have a negative effect on user adoption and impact your overall ROI. You will keep users happy by selecting a unified search technology that covers Web, enterprise and desktop search.

Think globally

You probably deal with business partners and customers around the globe whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise. You will, if you don’t yet. Therefore, your search solution should also offer support for a variety of different languages – especially complex Middle Eastern and Asian languages as well as Dutch, an especially vexing language for search engines and think globally. This will also make the task of extending the search solution to additional subsidiaries a smooth and simple process.

End notes

Search in all of its forms will continue to play an essential role in content and knowledge management as long as we continue to produce data. The enterprise search market will undoubtedly show increasing signs of consolidation over the next few years. Expect to see more and more verticalized search applications to help users search smarter on the Web and inside the firewall.

About the author

François Bourdoncle, a pioneer of the search engine software market, is the President and CEO of Exalead. In 2000, he co-founded Exalead with the goal of revolutionizing the search engine software market by providing users with a unified technology platform to access information in the enterprise.

Prior to Exalead, Bourdoncle was a researcher at both Digital Paris Research Laboratory and Digital Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif. While at Ecole des Mines de Paris, he collaborated with Patrice Bertin, an Exalead co-founder and the company's chief technology officer, on the LiveTopics project for AltaVista.

Bourdoncle developed Jazz, a programming language designed for synchronous digital circuits, as well as Exascript, an object-oriented XML programming language based on Java™ technology.

Bourdoncle holds a PhD. in computer science from Paris-based École Polytechnique. He is the author of several various technical papers and publications, and is a frequent speaker at industry events.