The Search for Search Stops Here
Overview: Unified Search
When choosing an optimal search solution to manage massive amounts of data—data that increases on a daily basis—it is crucial for organizations to consider myriad factors. Among these, four stand out as most important: universality, relevancy, user interactivity and security. Using a system that falls short in any one of these areas hurts a company on numerous fronts: productivity, smart decision making, morale, confidentiality—and ultimately—the bottom line.
Powerful Internet searches are readily available—a user can find the answer to the “number of steps in the Statue of Liberty” in under a second. And yet, in the workplace, trying to track down a pertinent piece of data from an in-house repository or intranet can prove impossible. In fact, some searches are so slow and their returns so limited, that it’s entirely possible for some information to seem to have disappeared altogether, never to be “heard from” again.
A unified search, on the other hand, prevents the aforementioned pitfalls by scouring and indexing all available information and data, regardless of how scattered these sources are among various silos and no matter if they are structured or unstructured (or filed in some top-secret “unique” fashion developed by a former employee who forgot to leave instructions on how to crack his filing code, based upon, say, his pets’ birthdays). Not only do such searches yield desired and helpful results, they also instill user confidence.
The positive user experience can be further enhanced by an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that doesn’t require hours-long training sessions or the need to drill down via numerous dropdown menus and continued clicks. Add speed to the equation and the results provide still more satisfaction and increased productivity.
Challenge: Universal Search
It’s no secret that every company possesses a wealth of information that languishes for lack of use. Millions of frustrated workers could be more productive if only they had easy access to buried information. Also, information that cannot be tracked down requires repeat research and data re-creation, a huge waste of time and money.
Because employees are always creating new valuable content that can be leveraged by co-workers—if they can access it—not only are data stores growing at an exponential rate, so is the potential for data misplacement, because not all employees use the same filing system or are even diligent about publishing content in places that enable information-sharing. Also, much data is unstructured, making a search for it still more difficult. And yet, the ability to access unstructured information can be particularly critical to making the best decisions and forecasts.
Adding to search headaches is the fact that many companies still use search solutions that can only search one silo. Such limitation is exacerbated in cases where only metadata is searched. When this happens, search systems fail to examine all content even of this one silo, resulting in query returns that are further limited. Since the true value of a piece of content can only be realized if it is easily accessible to employees—even if they are unaware at the beginning of a search that a particular document exists—the key to successful full access lies in a simultaneous search of multiple silos.
This search must be able to track information that lies everywhere from intranet to file shares to Web servers not linked to the intranet to content and document management systems and other silos. There must be scrutiny from the employee phonebook to the ERP system and all points in between. The right solution should also be able to index hundreds of formats from HTML to PDF files to Microsoft Office Suite and others. And such a solution must be able to look beyond metadata, and examine full content regardless of whether it is structured or unstructured. That way, users are guaranteed a clean and thorough sweep of every data corner, even dark and hidden ones, so that data stored “under the couch,” so to speak, by a product manager in London can later be easily spotted—and be quite beneficial—to a sales manager in San Jose.
Challenge: Relevancy is More Than a Little Relevant
When a search engine fails to consistently deliver relevant results to queries, usage of the system plummets because it is seen as hindering progress rather than promoting it. In order to encourage searches on a regular basis every query return needs to deliver accurate results that are ranked in prioritized order. Many users of traditional enterprise search technology have seen inconsistent search results—some of their queries deliver accurate, well-targeted results while others return irrelevant information.
Also, many administrators of these search systems spend time trying to “tune” the systems—making adjustments to improve the system only to have these adjustments backfire. For example, when tuning a certain set of results, a search administrator might be unknowingly demoting or penalizing some other content sources or sets of query terms. This fine tuning for a small subset of users or documents then comes at the expense of the enterprise as a whole. Even if tuning were to work, the process creates a huge amount of manual labor for IT. Beyond, say, a thousand documents, it doesn’t scale due to the complexity of administering scripts and having to re-start the engine or re-index documents anytime a change is made.
The best search solutions offer pre-existing “fine tuning,” which doesn’t require ongoing work on the part of IT but automatically assures the most relevant results in all search scenarios. Such “fine tuning” includes the ability to automatically correct misspellings, search for synonymous phrases, rank returns beginning with the greatest relevancy (including direct and related results), offer returns for acronyms that include both the acronym and its “spelled-out” version, offer synonyms (and returns for these synonyms), and automatically update and index additional information as it is added, and do all this quickly and comprehensively.
That said, IT still needs the ability to accommodate company-specific search requirements such as “teaching” the search solution to show, as the most relevant hit, the location of an application when that application name is typed into a search. A true solution will automatically meet 99% of an organization’s needs out of the box while still offering adjustment flexibility at the margins so that any tuning that does need to happen is the exception rather than the rule.
Challenge: Avoiding User Freak-Out
Some search engines require users to perform an elaborate tango where a simple two-step would be much easier. This might entail using dropdown menus that rely on complicated classification systems where even multiple clicks bring up page after page of useless results, dragging out what ultimately amounts to a futile process in the end. Compounding user frustration in these instances is the knowledge that comprehensive, universal searches do exist—they encounter such success regularly when conducting searches on the Internet, using powerful search systems that instantly return well-ranked, highly relevant results. They want the same sort of results at work.