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Enterprise Search: Both Content and Context are Important
Most search engines are getting pretty good at crawling, extracting and cataloging content. While search algorithms are sophisticated, they still can’t read your mind and understand the nuances of exactly what you’re looking for. Google is great, but it can only go so far.
How can search improve? By understanding who is doing the search. Next generation search engines will not only understand the content of data they index, but they will also understand who is doing the search and the context of their thinking.
PCWorld quotes Burton analyst Guy Creese as saying that “relevance is in the eye of the beholder — what’s relevant for me may not be relevant for you. Consequently, what’s needed is a profile of the user (interests, vocabulary, previous searches, job title, etc.) and a profile of the content (author, subject, date, who’s read it, etc.) Great search matches the two up.”
Creese thinks that sales-focused search done by marketers like Amazon.com may be creating a model for a better style of search. Big on-line retailers collect massive amounts of data about you as a consumer and your likes and dislikes, and as a result, they can sharpen their search results based on that information — and they often even ‘push’ search results to you, anticipating what you may want to know.
“Enterprise search vendors for a long time have spent a lot of effort on profiling content, but not profiling users. This will change over time, as systems such as Amazon.com make it clear that knowing a lot about the user makes it easier to find and suggest relevant content,” said Creese.
The more that the search engine knows about who is searching, the better the engine can hone into the most relevant results to the person doing the search and the context in which the search is done.
