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Enterprise Search: Consumer Search Path Hints at Direction for the Enterprise
“Information access technology will locate and analyze more than 90 percent of data in more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises by the end of 2012,” predicted Gartner analyst Whit Andrews in 2008.
Well, maybe that was a bit ambitious of a prediction for Enterprise Search, but that’s not to say that the market hasn’t been growing. Gartner says that the Enterprise Search market has grown at a rate of 11.7 percent each year since Andrews made his prediction in 2008. The market size ended 2012 at $1.7 billion and is expected to reach $1.9 billion by the end of 2013.
In 2013, Andrews now says that the search market is changing. In many ways, expectations in Enterprise Search are lagging what happens in the consumer search space. Watching what happens in the consumer space can be an indicator about what is ahead in the enterprise space. Andrews says that consumer search engines like Google and Bing are setting expectations high for users. People now expect to just be able to type a few terms or key words and to be able to find the relevant information that they were looking for.
Andrews says that both Google and Bing are evolving, trying to become more precise in the answers that they provide. Traditionally a search on Google, for example, will bring back a list of documents or web pages that are highly related to the search criteria. It’s the job then for the user to look at those documents and come up with the ‘final answer’. Search engines like Google and Bing are now attempting to go directly to the ‘final answer’, eliminating the need for users to browse documents and web pages to find it. Google, for example, now will answer simple questions directly, like math questions, world time, calendar and holidays.
Andrews says that by the end of 2017 that more than half of consumer searches will not be producing lists of documents, but a ‘final answer’. That might include a spoken answer (like Siri on mobile), a picture, or a document constructed dynamically by aggregating information from many sources.
