Search's "Sweet Spot": Finding the Middle Ground
Whether it’s in the form of email, text documents or multimedia files, having the right information at our fingertips is
essential for making business decisions. Regardless of the size of your company or the industry, information is our lifeline to help keep a pulse on our customers and competitors, and serves as the basis for making important business decisions.
We’ve come to recognize that the overall performance of any organization depends heavily on how well its employees use information to do their jobs. Unfortunately, over the past several years, the process of information search and retrieval has become too hard. A simple search box and a list of results are no longer sufficient to navigate the content within an organization, which is stored across myriad locations and in hundreds of different formats. Even novice users find the need to use what are considered to be advanced search features to find relevant information.
Human nature further complicates the process of search, which can be frustrating and lengthy. This holds especially true if a searcher doesn’t know exactly what he or she is looking for at the onset of a search. Dead ends and irrelevant results often lead searchers to abandon a query and then unnecessarily recreate information. Independent research firm IDC estimates that the average employee spends 3-1/2 hours a week on searches that fail to locate the desired information. Further, IDC claims that employees then spend another three hours per week recreating content that may already be stored within the
enterprise.
Of course, the answers don’t always lie within the organization; Web search plays a distinct role in business and how we work. Over the years, enterprise search has gained a reputation for being complex and expensive, while consumer search engines are free and easy to use but “too simplistic” for business use.
The reality is that many CIOs end up spending anywhere from two to 10 times the cost of the software in professional services to make the solution useful. That’s because some search solutions are application platforms rather than actual products, which makes integration a challenge. Additionally, taxonomy projects—which are mandatory for some scenarios—are incredibly costly and time-consuming, adding months to your deployment schedule and negatively impacting your ROI.
The search “sweet spot” is the middle ground between these two schools of thought and is exactly why Exalead has integrated Web search into all of its enterprise search products to allow users to search for information regardless of format or location, all from a single, unified access point.
There are many different products designed to optimize different areas of search. However, it’s important to consider a solution that provides a unified access point to information, whether it resides on one’s PC, the company Intranet or a data silo on the other side of the globe. Forcing users to learn separate tools to search different data repositories will only have a negative effect on user adoption and impact your overall ROI. By selecting a unified search technology that covers desktop, enterprise and Web search, you will keep employees happy.
As long as we continue to produce data, search in all of its forms will continue to play an essential role in knowledge and content management. Over the next few years the enterprise search market will undoubtedly show increasing signs of consolidation. On the consumer side of search, expect to see more and more verticalized Web search engines designed for searching specialized content. Search should be recognized as a critical business function, as it can: improve the decision-making process; foster collaboration; empower employees to respond to market trends; and increase sales by making information accessible and easy to navigate.
Exalead is a global provider of software that is designed to simplify all aspects of information search and retrieval for organizations of all sizes.
Exalead software is used by leading banking and financial services, media, consumer packaged goods, research, retailing sports entertainment and telecommunications companies around the world, including Air Liquid, BNP Paribas and Carlson Wagonlits. Exalead is an operating unit of Qualis, an international holding company.