Enterprise Search: After a Decade, Still Continues to Disappoint and Frustrate Users

Despite advances in technology, Enterprise Search continues to dissatisfy a majority or a near-majority of users.  Three years ago an AIIM study found that 49 percent of users thought that enterprise search was too cumbersome and slow to be of much use.

Director of Knowledge Management at FSG, Carl Frappaolo, said in 2008 that “Findability has been a common source of frustration in the enterprise for decades.  As information has become more and more digital, from its creation through to management, the pain of finding enterprise information has moved from the piles of paper on the desktop and in storage cabinets, to the digital landfill of file servers, e-mail inboxes, digital desktops and content management systems. Despite the advances made in search on the Internet, enterprise search leaves most users frustrated.”

Fast forward to 2011 and it looks like things haven’t changed much over the last three years.  In a summary of a report from the Real Story Group, Alan Pelz-Sharpe writes that “the enterprise search market can be described (at best) as slow moving. Although names may change over the years, the underlying technology remains much as it was a decade ago. On the one hand, this is a positive thing, because we have mature, scalable, and well-tested offerings that generally perform well. On the other hand, we have search engines that continue to fall short of end users’ expectations, no matter how realistic those expectations are. Many expectations are set in large part by Internet search experiences (via the likes of Google and Bing), which is a very different search paradigm with few of the necessary restrictions or challenges of enterprise search.”

In a new study from MindMetre Research and sponsored by SmartLogic finds that over 52 percent of users report that they typically are unable to find what they are searching for using enterprise search within an acceptable amount of time.   The report found that most users could accept a search taking two minutes, but searches which exceed four minutes are considered unacceptable by most users.  Only 48 percent of respondents that use enterprise search said that they typically could perform searches under two minutes.

Jeremy Bentley, Smartlogic Chief Executive, said that “There is evidently a substantial gap between expectation and reality – ‘enterprise search’ often doesn’t mean ‘enterprise find’”.