Enterprise search is not a simple matter

If you work in an enterprise, chances are you've heard the complaint: "Why can't our search work more like Google?" Employees, spoiled by the Google search experience on the web quite naturally think it should be simple enough to extend to the enterprise. Unfortunately, as Dan Woods points out in his Jargon Spy column on Forbes.com this week, it's not easy to extend this type of search to the enterprise for a number of reasons related to the differences between the open web and a company content repository.

In fact, AIIM released a study last spring that proved that employees want a consumer experience, but the enterprise is a different animal. In an article in EContent called "Enterprise Search Still Lacking", Carl Frappaolo, VP at AIIM stated that the enterprise has to deal with what he calls a digital landfill of information. With so many content sources to cross, it's not easy to pinpoint the document you need. Woods points out that Google is built on a page rank algorithm and most companies don't have a link-based system.

There are a myriad of other issues, too, including the fact that, as Woods points out, you don't always know what you're looking for. One way to solve this issue is to use targeted tagging, but in a large enterprise this is a hard system to keep under control. There are, in fact, no simple answers to enterprise search. If there were, somebody would be making a lot of money.

For more information:
- read Wilson's column [1]
- check out the EContent article [2]
- view AIIM's findability study [3]