How Search 2.0 Will Impact the Enterprise

Search in the future will look nothing like today’s simple search engine interfaces. If in 10 years we are still using a rectangular box and a list of results, I should be fired.
—Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research, The New York Times, Sunday March 11, 2007

Microsoft’s Susan Dumais has been among the leading lights in search research for more than a decade. No one is in a better position to announce the end of Search 1.0—the small box with the often-irrelevant results list—than she. That she is now betting her job on the emergence of a search 2.0 is a leading indicator you can take to the bank. Search will change drastically in the next 10 years. We will be happy with the results, but getting there is going to take imagination, innovation and a relentless determination to experiment with the emerging technologies the global Web is birthing every year.

While we can’t see all of the details of search 2.0 from where we stand today, we can see very clearly the key direction in which we are heading. We are in the process of moving away from 25 years spent working from a data-centered model for search. We are now replacing this with a customer- or user-centered model for search. This means that the data-centered approach, with its preoccupation with the document and its contents, has come up short. It can never be successful because it cannot deliver any intelligence about the task the user is trying to accomplish or the context of the question the user is trying to answer. Today’s research horizons are all about using the growing numbers of clues in the electronic environment to bring the user’s intention into the center of the search interaction.

We see multiple trends taking hold in the market that will drive the emergence of search 2.0. Some of them are coming from new business mandates; some of them are coming from new technology opportunities; and some of them are coming from new behaviors on the part of information consumers. In this article we will be considering first the business imperatives that are increasing the importance of search. Then we will be looking at three areas in which search 2.0 is taking shape and influencing enterprisewide strategies: as a new element of enterprise infrastructure, as a new enabler for emergent customer interaction models, and as the core for new businesses built-from-the-ground-up for the Web and its new service models.

The Business Mandate

The big battlefields of today’s search wars are all about information consumers. Many of the tenacious IT infrastructure problems of the past decade have largely been solved, leading commentators like Nicholas Carr to declare IT irrelevant in the pages of the Harvard Business Review. But with the increasing severity of the search or findability problem, and the increasing economic role search is now playing in online businesses and marketing strategies, suddenly IT is engaged more intimately with the business than ever before; companies are now struggling with solving the information-access puzzle for their customers, and often their customers’ customers.

More than 50% of C-level executives recently surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit and FAST indicated that the emergence of ubiquitous broadband is the biggest single technological influence on their business strategy. It is this kind of thinking that is driving a new kind of information sophistication that recognizes that the firm’s online experience is becoming a primary new differentiator. In face of growing data volumes and complexity, it is increasingly search that provides the tools that allow companies to extract the most business value out of their unique strength—their knowledge and experience, as it is captured in their content and their connections and interfaces to their users and customers.

Innovative firms are now beginning to implement search in a manner that extends across the information value chain from intelligent infrastructure, through a suite of connection services, and into the contextualized interaction with customers. They have discovered that search is a primary method to connect customers with answers, analytics, actionable services and other people who are relevant to completing a task or taking a decision. Search is a mechanism to help translate the information universe into terms that customers understand, to help understand what the customer intends to accomplish and, of course, to deliver what the customer wants.

The new architecture of search 2.0 offers enterprises the ability to address three core strategic objectives that will help drive the next wave of business online: consumption-oriented IT architectures; agile service delivery platforms; and extreme business innovation.

Consumption-Oriented Architecture

Good architectural principles and deep understanding of established frameworks have always been critical to successful adoption and integration of new infrastructure capabilities. Search is emerging as the orchestration mechanism for user-centric SOA-based architectures, offering innovative functionality for re-engineering both the user experience and the data access layers that support it.

We find some leading examples of search innovation at the data access layer of some of the largest telecom and financial enterprises in the world. Their experience reveals the following five advantages that are characteristic of a search 2.0 approach:

1. High performance, scalability and reliability, with ability to sustain high throughput, low latency request service and scale in terms of request rates, content volumes and 24x7 reliability.

2. Lowered integration effort, since they deliver data in a single, standardized format and provide access over a common API, and they facilitate easy expansion of application scope and the re-use of data from multiple sources.

3. Easier change management, due to a stable and extensible data format (XML) and a standard access pattern, so that changes in sources or consumers can proceed without impact.