Enterprise Search and Pursuit of the Google Experience Pt2

By Jeff Carr (@siftonpark) Jul 28, 2010 Comments

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Why can't we just get Google? That's a common question often heard from all levels within an organization that is trying to improve the search experience on their intranet. In part one, we examined the desire to duplicate the Google search experience in the enterprise (you can read part 1 here). In part 2, we will examine shifting the perspective to the user experience and end with 6 essential activities to the construction of a solid foundation for any enterprise search initiative.

Shifting Perspectives, Moving from Appliance to Experience

Within the enterprise, we can see that organizational content is frequently structured quite differently than its web content counterpart. Often, a single document such as a policy, standard operating procedure or corporate guideline will be comprised of tens if not hundreds of pages along with a multitude of topics. As a result, the automated extraction and indexation of all that text tends to provide less insight into what that document is really about.

While a variety of those 200 plus signals might still apply in one form or another behind the firewall, many of the more important attributes influencing algorithmic relevancy on the web, such as targeted keyword use and a complex interlinking between information assets, are rare. This means the process of automated metadata inference in this manner becomes less powerful overall.

As a result, we need to change our perspective on what we expect from enterprise search based on what we’re willing to do to make it work. This means taking a closer look into redesigning the overall experience to move away from an emphasis on full-text indexing and toward ways that not only provide direct access to the answer, but also promote discovery, exploration and raise awareness.

Enterprise search should in fact be more relevant inside the organization primarily because we have greater control over both the inputs and outputs required to make it work. If we start thinking about how best to facilitate the conversation by taking a more active role in understanding our content and its structure, along with our users and their access needs, we will be better able to design and deliver a simpler, more effective and relevant search experience.

Disambiguation through Faceted Refinement

Our existing enterprise search tools (out of the box) place little emphasis on promoting conversation through the process of disambiguation. Facilities inherent within the technology that do so are commonly not configured properly, don’t have the appropriate inputs available or are turned off altogether. As a result, full-text indexing along with the document title, short snippet and ten results per page become the common default experience.

One approach we’re beginning to see more of in an effort to improve enterprise search comes to us in the form of faceted refinement. The introduction of facets to the search interface provides the ability to easily refine a result set based on the unique properties of the result set itself.

Known as faceted search or guided navigation, it provides for the categorization of search results based on metadata attributes, along with the numerical distribution of those results across available values. Like the approaches to disambiguation mentioned earlier, this type of advanced search helps guide searchers down the appropriate path by providing a variety of predefined options for discovery, rather than a relying on the searcher to know exactly what they’re looking for in advance.

However, unlike the typical ecommerce experience where product attributes such as size, color and price inherently become the basis for facet development, the ability to succinctly describe organizational content in the same manner is a greater challenge. The establishment of meaningful dimensions is a subjective exercise in defining both the “is-ness” of our content as well as its “about-ness”, or how we wish to describe it. A well thought out and intuitively designed metadata schema and controlled vocabulary are the foundation to a successful faceted search experience.