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Enterprise Search: Can you Find it?
Can you find it? The resounding answer from a majority of enterprise users is ‘No’!
In two separate polls, users said that they’re frustrated and want a better solution for search for enterprise information. Author and researcher Stephen Arnold found the number to be as high as two-thirds of users that he surveyed in large government agencies. A poll by Search company Sinequa of 200 London office workers found the level of dissatisfaction at 59 percent.
Keyword search proves to be very limiting in the enterprise. Algorithms to determine relevance that work well in broad internet searches fail. The problem is that enterprises often have many documents with very narrow content, jargon and keywords. Search limited to a single search field can frustrate users when the number of hits for a keyword search are high and relevancy of the hits being returned are all similar.
It’s not that people don’t have ideas about how to fix the problem. More than 150 companies dedicated to search are in business today, but this shear number of companies adds confusion around what will work best for a specific organization.
Simply crawling and indexing the documents of an organization isn’t enough. Being able to match information about who the author of a document was and what organization the author belongs to are simple facts that can narrow the relevancy of a document. If we could include tags and metadata assigned to the document, we would further be able to refine the essence of the document’s content and help us pinpoint information in our searches. If information about the life-cycle of the document were known, the more easily the data could be searched and ranked by relevancy.
But features like metadata, authoring and life-cycle data essentially turn enterprise sound like document management. Maybe Enterprise Search of the future will be a convergence of enterprise search and document management.
