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Enterprise search is not a simple matter

September 23, 2008 — 10:35am ET | By Ron Miller

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
- check out the EContent article
- view AIIM's findability study

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Comments

By C. David Seuss | Posted 5:04pm | September 24, 2008

One of the biggest myths in corporate IT is the single search solution that is applicable enterprise-wide for all enterprise content. This doozy of a bad idea is responsible for untold millions of dollars being thrown out the window by many of the world’s most technologically savvy companies.

"Generic" enterprise search projects typically fail because search applications need to reflect the business purpose of each type of search, the characteristics of the content set that is best suited for returning high quality results for that business purpose, and the needs of the users that have the business need to search that material. Market Research needs a different search solution than Accounting; Sales needs a different search solution than Human Resources. An effective search solution customizes the user interface, metadata, search and text analytics, content sets – everything.

So if somebody in your organization observes that much of the enterprise’s information is in silos, and suggests how great things would be if it all could be searched in one pass -- put the kibosh on the idea, quick!

-C. David Seuss
CEO, Northern Light Group

By rmiller | Posted 7:36am | September 26, 2008

Thanks for the comment. I think the ultimate goal is to actually to be able to do that and the federated search vendors are doing a pretty good job. The trouble is that it's difficult and expensive to implement.

I would agree that throwing a simple solution such as a Google Search Appliance at the problem is not going to work across an entire enterprise, but even though it's difficult to have a unified search, it's still a worthwhile goal, and in my view at least not an impossible one.

Thanks again for taking the time to write. I appreciate your input and hope we can continue the conversation.

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