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Search is an incredibly interesting problem, one that’s so complex in the background yet so simple on the surface. In this two part article, we examine the desire to duplicate the Google search experience in the enterprise and how we need to change what we expect from enterprise search based on what we’re willing to do to make it work.
What could be easier than entering a few keywords into a single text box and, in a fraction of a second, being granted access to tens or even hundreds of millions of relevant resources — all the information we could ever really want right at the tips of our fingers. For most, this is perceived as a near perfect user experience that is today’s reality when we search online using Google.
Yet a common complaint heard internally across many organizations is the inability to easily find the right answer amongst a set of far fewer, and often less relevant results. The organization of content into intuitive information architectures is a challenging problem, and the creation of navigational constructs that classify information into meaningful categories is becoming increasingly difficult due to the sheer volume of content being produced.
The user experience is increasingly becoming both complicated and fragmented and is placing a greater emphasis on search as the silver bullet. Unfortunately, search too is failing to meet the needs of our users and is oftentimes perceived as nothing more than “a random document generator”, as one client has colorfully put it.
Why Can’t We Just Get Google?
Interestingly, this is a common question asked during many of our intranet redesign initiatives. We hear it from end-users on the frontlines all the way up to senior level management, executives and everywhere in between. But before we look for an answer, let’s take a step back and build a bit of a foundation by examining some of the fundamentals of web search itself.
As human visitors to a web page, we expect to see a variety of visual cues embedded within the interface. Graphic design, eye-catching imagery and the logical layout of content are all elements that appeal to us as we interact with a site and its content.
In their absence, the site’s ability to keep us engaged dramatically diminishes and we quickly lose interest. In contrast, the search engine’s experience of the same page is purely textual, ignoring most if not all of the parts that draw us in. To illustrate, let’s take a look at the difference between what a visitor sees versus what Google sees:
Visitor View
Google View
Text only cached version of this page in Google
Google’s crawler, the Googlebot, has the primary function of finding, consuming and indexing content from across the web. But it doesn’t stop there. More attributes are taken into consideration in order to determine relevancy and display of the appropriate search results for a particular query.
A short video from Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google, shows at a high level how the search engine locates, indexes and ranks web documents:
Essentially, Google traverses the internet by following links and consuming the content it finds along the way. It attempts to implicitly derive the meaning of a document based on the document’s content by examining terminology and, to put all that text into context, uses signals like the occurrence of words and the relative value of those occurrences, including positioning, weight and semantic relationships to infer relevancy. It does so by asking questions, “more than 200 of them”, of the document itself, as well as the document’s context within the larger corpus of indexed content (see How Google Search Works (1:16) video above)
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