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ECM Trends: Faceted Search Improves Findability
A new buzz word has entered the ECM lexicon: Faceted Search. Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMSWatch names faceted search as his number two expected trend in ECM for 2010. Alfresco is also considering added faceted search capabilities to their Open Source ECM product.
but just what is faceted search? Early on, Search on the internet followed two models:
– Yahoo and DMOZ pioneered navigational search. Real-life editors were appointed, much like librarians, to break down the information on the internet into a tree of hierarchical categories. This method often achieved superior results by providing the best links for particular categories of information. But the problem with the approach is that building the navigational tree and researching the content is tedious and involves many human hours, the results get quickly out of date, and the quality and uniformity of the results often depended very much on the ability and biases of the category editor.
– Google popularized a simple direct search approach. With direct search, rather than humans, software bots and spiders are used to constantly check and review content changes on the internet. The results are often more consistent, more uniform, and broader than that of navigational search, but they may not be as focused or accurate. With the explosion of new and changing content, direct search results became the preferred internet search method because it could provide fresher links into new content almost as quickly as the content is created.
On the Internet, direct search is the clear winner in terms of popularity and usage. But perhaps because of the simplicity of direct search there still is dissatisfaction in its results.
Faceted search tries to combine the capabilities of both navigational and direct search. It is similar to how search works on an e-Commerce site like Amazon. You can enter keywords to search for like in Google, but you can narrow down the results by including category information or ‘facet dimensions’ like age range, gender, or brand.
Faceted Search in effect augments spidered and automated direct search with automated categorization of content. The results can be great, but in practice, results tend to be best when faceted search is applied to a very specific topic, like e-commerce or real estate. But as the technology improves, we can expect to see more usage of faceted search both in business and on the internet.
