The Landscape of Enterprise Search

Susanne Koch

@susanneanette / @pandianews

Pandia.com

Online Information Conference

London, December 1 2011

My topic today• A short introduction to the challenges of

enterprise search

• Four trends in the field of enterprise search

• Challenges that face organisations looking to acquire an enterprise search system

• And some advice

Challenge 1: Diverse data sources

• Not like indexing the Web:– Company web site– Intranet– Document management system– E-mail systems– In-house databases – And more

Cc license of Flickr by Casimusica

Challenge 2: Differing standards• Enterprise search engines index and

compares information– Found in different platforms – Following different file standards– Structured by different taxonomies

Challenge 3: Diverse content

• Not just web pages, but– Archive documents and case files– E-mails– Spreadsheets– Manuals and procedures– Images– Videos– And more

Challenge 4: Ranking results• Google’s algorithms use information from

millions of users, billions of links

• Enterprise search has data generated by some hundreds or thousands of searchers

• This data has to be supplemented by other information, often on page text and metatags

Some solutions• Recently, many enterprise

search vendors have improved the usability, performance, and functionality of their systems

• Some of them have managed to overcome some of the problems presented above

• The trends presented in the following are not the only ones, but identify some major features

Trend 1: Search within applications • Users no longer want to hunt for information

across different systems

• Some enterprise search solutions integrate with the systems holding the information and make it searchable from within that system

• Autonomy and Exalead are doing this

Trend 2: Combining structured and unstructured data• Search results do not have to be lists of links

that the searcher has to analyse herself

• Instead the search systems generate reports that summarise the data the search retrieved

• The enterprise search engine may also attempt to visualize the data requested

• Endeca is doing this

Trend 3: Combining different content types in search results

• The increase in rich media leads to a need for searching multiple disparate content sources with one query

• Some vendors display results lists where texts, images, videos etc. are all presented and sorted not by content type, but by relevance

• Vivisimo is doing this

Trend 4: Integrated social functions• Some vendors let users create groups around a

particular topic. A person looking for information can identify these groups or search the content tagged by them

• This requires critical mass to work

• Microsoft is doing this

The buyer’s conundrum

• Choose between complex and different products

• Many decision makers lack specific experience in this field

• Often there is no strong connection between those who are buying the solution and those who are going to use it

• Difficult to identify in advance which information access problems are to be solved

Questions to ask in advance• What specific functions are essential?

• What kind of content is to be processed?

• How frequently is the index to be updated?

• How will the the data to be searched grow?

• How might future search needs be different?

What others have found• The buyer may not know what is needed until

the system is deployed

• Some times the vendor does not learn what the licensee really meant in the system requirements document until it is too late

• Allow time and resources to go beyond what you, the buyer, think you want and find out what you really need

Get the book!

This presentation is based on a new monograph

by Stephen E. Arnold:

The Landscape of Enterprise Search

http://pandia.com/enterprise-search

Photos supplied by Photos.com where other information is not given