A search box; a search button; and ten blue links – what could possibly be missing from this equation? With the volume of information within enterprises growing exponentially, it is also becoming harder to sift through the noise to find needed information. Enterprise search is a critical tool for retrieving and uncovering relevant content. But when search results don’t return the desired content, frustrated users are driven to try out yet another search engine; continuously repeating the same cycle, also known as The Enterprise Search Cycle.

BA Insight’s Principal Search Architect, Mike Himelstein, recently explored the enterprise search cycle and the drivers behind successful search. Why is search broken? What are the steps organizations can take to eliminate the cycle of broken search? Before embarking on the next search journey, companies must answer a set of questions to understand how to make search work in their organization.

Download the presentation, and read more about taking the path to ultimately transforming the search experience at your organization.

With SharePoint’s 2013 social search features, finding expertise across an organization has never been easier. Everyone from sales teams, to project managers, to human resources, to frontline problem solvers, benefit from a versatile engine that taps into a search engine and will rapidly identify expert knowledge. BA Insight’s Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering, Jeff Fried, recently presented at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York, several successful systems that use social behavior to provide strong cues to expertise finding. Applications in recruiting, collaboration, and team creation were highlighted.

Click here to learn more about expertise finding and the techniques to empower your people through social search in SharePoint 2013.

Many organizations implement SharePoint for a number of different reasons including collaboration, content management, business intelligence, process improvement, and many others. These are areas where organizations are leveraging the vast capabilities of SharePoint 2010 to allow their users to work smarter and not harder.

But one area that many organizations seem to forget about is the powerful enterprise search capabilities that are available out of the box with SharePoint 2010. Search tends to be one of those areas with SharePoint that “just works,” so what usually happens in an organization is that the farm gets setup and search gets configured — results come back and it is assumed that everything must be working. Right? This approach is very common which is why when I go to work with different companies I often hear the same story about how “Search is broken” or “search sucks.” But the fact of the matter is that in order to work to its full potential, search can’t be entirely an afterthought. However, getting better results from search doesn’t require a lot of effort.

Enterprise Search best practices are often hotly debated, depending on who you speak with. A System Integrator will often argue that a successful search implementation starts with a complete assessment of an organization’s information architecture, whereas an ISV will argue that software should (and is capable) of automating much of the manual labor associated with optimizing an enterprise search platform. So rather than present my perspective, which I’m sure you can guess (BA Insight is an ISV), I thought that presenting some findings from over 20 years of research on what has proven not to work would be of interest to some of you.