Return on Information
Adding Value to Your ROI

The requirements for a website search solution are remarkably similar to the internal search requirements discussed earlier—usability, relevancy, comprehensiveness, security and ease of administration. Security is an important consideration especially for extranets or websites that ask for user credentials, as in customer support applications.

An effective website search solution can yield a high ROI in two quantifiable ways:

• Increase website leads. By directing website visitors to the appropriate product page, an effective search solution can increase website leads. Consider a mid-size company with $100 million in annual revenues, where 20% of its sales originate from website leads. If the website leads can improve even by 5%, that can imply an increase in revenue of $1 million per year to the business.
• Reduce customer support costs. 90% of customers who have purchased online have used site search to access self-service content (Harris Interactive). The case for increased online self-support is strong: the average cost of phone support is $20 per incident and email support is $15 per incident. But online self-support costs a mere $5 per incident (ContactCenterWorld). Even migrating 5% to 10% of these incidents to self-support can yield contact centers a 2% to 5% overall cost reduction, resulting in measurable savings.

In addition to the above, effective search can deliver important "soft" benefits, such as enhanced satisfaction, better brand perception and improved customer experience.

For many years, enterprises have been building, accumulating, upgrading and replacing numerous information systems and investing heavily in building and maintaining these systems. Overall, these systems have steadily improved productivity. However, with the explosion of content in recent years, and the evolution of effective enterprise search, a missing link in a content strategy has become evident: a findability solution. Ultimately, true findability will yield the return on information—and on investment—that organizations have been seeking.

Google Search Appliance: The Google Search Experience for Your Business Information
The Google Search Appliance brings the familiar Google search experience to your company, whether it is internally for your employees or on your website for your visitors. Users simply want Google when they search; companies that deploy the Google Search Appliance notice a significant increase in search usage. For instance, search queries on Reuters.com went up by 750% after deploying the Google Search Appliance.

By searching all enterprise content—including websites, intranets, file shares, databases, content management systems and real-time business data—the Google Search Appliance provides a one-stop searching experience. In addition, the Google Search Appliance offers a personalized search experience, so that users get results more appropriate to their function. For instance, a marketing manager might want different search results than an engineering manager for the same search query. And finally, by integrating with popular single sign-on mechanisms such as LDAP, NTLM, Windows Integrated Authentication and others, the Google Search Appliance delivers a high level of security, ensuring that users only see documents and search results that they are authorized to view.

As an appliance that integrates hardware, software, search algorithms and security, the Google Search Appliance offers a unique architecture unlike traditional enterprise search systems. A single appliance (2U server) can search up to 10 million documents, whereas traditional solutions might require five to 10 servers for that volume of content. This ease of scalability enables IT administrators to grow their searchable content seamlessly, without purchasing new hardware or requiring upgrades.

The Google Search Appliance serves the search needs of thousands of customers ranging from 50-person organizations to Global 50 enterprises.