Enterprise Search: A View from the Crawl Space – The Search Journey

Written by Inna Gordin, Search Blog Editor on 07/20/2012. Posted in BA Insight News, CIO's Corner, FAST Search, Understanding Search

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Enterprise search technology is incredibly useful and powerful, but very few people understand how to apply it well. Perhaps because search looks so simple on the outside, or perhaps because of the universal familiarity with web search, enterprise search is generally poorly understood. There are many misconceptions and misunderstandings about enterprise search, and in many organizations the first comment you hear about an intranet is, “the search is useless.”

We can do search better. There is no silver bullet or secret sauce, but if you follow some basic ground rules and utilize some proven, practical techniques, you can make search something that people not only use but love.

“With great enterprise search, organizations can quickly respond to market changes, innovate and accelerate their time to market. Without good search, people drown in their own information,” writes Jeff Fried, CTO of BA Insight in his new article “The Search Journey”, “When search works well, people use it. Improving search quality will increase its utilization and make people more effective at their jobs.” In the first installment of his regular TechNet column, A View from the Crawl Space, Fried gives practical advice for how to make search the useful, powerful tool it can be. Fried explains that search is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, and while this means that enterprises are able to create a solution perfectly tailored to their unique needs, it also means that there is no secret sauce or silver bullet strategy for search adoption. There are, however, certain key common denominators.

Fried outlines three ground rules that apply in all cases and should be heeded by any organization, regardless of where they are in the “search journey”. The three rules are simple:

Start projects with envisioning and out-of-the-box search
Make search administration someone’s job
Enlist the users.

Visit TechNet’s Enterprise Search Research Center or read Fried’s full article “The Search Journey” (PDF) to learn more about the three rules and other practical advice for building great search.