Keep on Searching

Enterprise search has become a vital tool for companies looking to reap value from their corporate data. One of the emerging features of search, and one that is likely to push its popularity even further, is that it will turn into a social application. The socialization of search is a trend that is likely to become more prominent over the next few years in the same way as the popularity of other participant-created content continues to skyrocket. As with Wikipedia, users are invited to add information, which will help other users find what they are looking for. This merging of search and Web 2.0 concepts will provide much more refined and useful results; users will be able to vote on, rate, tag, save and share content. “What we are likely to see more of is group discussion or participation in search results,” predicts Thersa Regli, Principal at CMS Watch. “People can rank a search result and judge whether a result is good, bad or relevant. Some search engines allow you, for example, to have a discussion board right under the search results to talk about a result’s usefulness.”

Regli predicts that search analytics is also going to rise in importance. “Companies can use search analytics to find out what their users are searching for, whether or not they’re finding what they’re looking for and then look at statistics to evaluate the successfulness of the search. If it has not been as hoped, then the search engine needs to be adjusted accordingly.”

In addition, the user interface will improve and become much more simple and clear to use. One of the biggest challenges faced today is that the user interface is often too muddled and difficult to navigate around. This needs to change. “Google has had a huge influence on the UI,” she identifies. “People want a simple search interface. However, in some cases the opposite is happening. Some of the interfaces are too crowded and offer too many options. I expect to see this being simplified.”

De-cluttering

To get the best from enterprise search, Regli does not think an organization necessarily needs to improve its current system or update to new technology. The answer to better results is simple – clean up and improve the quality of content. “A lot of organizations – and we see this all the time at CMS Watch – have content that is in such a mess that the technology can’t really work with it very well. If you have a lot of unstructured content, you will find that implementing a search solution is very difficult. Anything companies can do to make its content more structured, better categorized and to enhance the metadata is going to make your technology work better, regardless of what it is. Whether you already have a search engine or you’re looking to pick a new one, I would always advise cleaning up your content and then seeing if your current technology works better first.”

Some vendors are even trying to help companies better organize their information in order to for the search solution to actually work better. “What many of the search tools are trying to do is auto-categorization, auto-classification of the content so that once the content is indexed, the search engine can deal with it a little better and present the results in a more organized way,” says Regli.

With this in mind, if an organization does decide to completely update its search solution, Regli advises that all employees who are going to use the technology are properly trained in its use first. “A lot of the time, people approach updating a search solution without necessarily knowing the technology very well,” she explains. “Make sure you work with somebody from the vendor or who has worked with the technology before. By doing this you are going to have a much better update process.”

Looking ahead to 2008

In the future, Regli expects to see an increased fusion between business intelligence and enterprise search. In order to improve search, many companies are complementing their search solutions by using business intelligence solutions in concert with them. “I think there are now flavors of search that work as business intelligence,” says Regli. “However, despite the fact that search is moving in the BI direction, most enterprise search tools that can retrieve information and create a dashboard for executives don’t do is as well as the pure play business intelligence vendors. Nevertheless, I think search will evolve in this direction. I think search companies want to be more than just search companies, so they will keep heading in the BI direction.”