How Search 2.0 Will Impact the Enterprise
access portal, connecting all point portals, is driven by powerful and flexible search, the framework for personalized user experience. Search is becoming the framework of choice to
support the user’s world of connectedness, the new interaction paradigm across formats, devices and environments.
Business Innovation
One of the cornerstones of a competitive online strategy is the ability to rapidly create, deploy and extract services and applications. This innovation speed is more important now than ever before. Across telecom, media and financial industries, companies face the most intense transformation in their history, due to strong market convergence caused by digitalization of content, growth of online services and entrance of non-traditional competitors. They race to find new business models that will maintain and protect existing customer relationships in a world where competition arises from new directions. The ability to quickly identify, test and launch profitable services in the industry’s converging landscape will determine who will win in the market. Capital investment should pay back, many times over, but only if their effect is targeted and immediate.
Search 2.0 is redefining what it means to shape the firm’s “digital front window,” highlighting the information that businesses want to bring forward, for internal and external users alike. In this sense, search is at the heart of helping operators characterize who they are and what they do. Indeed, there are many examples where search is at the core of new business models and at the base of new operational efficiencies. This list is a sampling of capabilities a robust search technology can enable: federation, merchandizing management; data cleansing; concept identification management; advertising management; taxonomy management; rich media mining; tracking and monitoring; interactive reporting; sentiment analysis; location search; real-time alerting; scope search; cross-device navigation and discovery; user group profiling and personalization; recommendation engines; semantic analysis; and more.
Search 2.0 Builds a Business
One of the world’s leading B2B publishers, with more than 2,000 academic journals and 1,900 new books per year, competes in the digital arena through industry-leading, focused innovative online products, which are released
and updated on a regular and aggressive schedule.
Their competitive strategy is targeted on increasing end-user productivity and addressing information overload. They have achieved these goals through four steps: 1. use of search tools that are able to leverage their unique knowledge of market, content and users; 2. customize their data to include only relevant selections from both publisher-controlled content and open Web sources; 3. provide more accurate and relevant search results to users who are dissatisfied with failed general searches; and 4. expose tailored means for navigating and searching metadata, categories and taxonomies. They have provided highly targeted and fresh services through careful segmentation of their markets based on user needs, and they have carefully sliced and diced their content to differentiate their services at point of discovery and delivery. The resulting systems provide authoritative, selective information enhanced with proprietary metadata and cross-linking, integrated into the user’s workflow and superior tools for refining and analyzing results. The result: several “best search engine” awards, as well as significant revenue growth.
Gartner has identified this “information access technology” as the single most important technology that strings across business to derive relevant insight and create significant value from investments in data. Search enables businesses to thrive in the new digital world, by allowing them to quickly develop new business models and move into new markets. In a world of real-time information requirements, ad hoc access to information and short time to market with new services are a core capability to protect current revenue and drive new sources of revenue.
The three core strategic objectives of online strategy based on search 2.0 do not come risk-free. A rich strategic framework requires a clear business-driven roadmap, synchronized across business functions and executed in an evolutionary acquisition and deployment manner. The search 2.0 platform approach can accelerate acquisition of new capabilities and provide recurring improvements to the system.
Search is the New Portal
“Search is the Portal” is the new mantra to financial statistics aggregators such as Reuters and the Financial Times, which have replaced database-centric access solutions with search for their top-of-the-line trading platforms and premium content on-line offerings. Business publishers, whether Hoovers in the US or
the exceptionally innovative Schibsted in Scandinavia, are pushing the frontiers of how to integrate data from multiple (20-100+) separate databases with radically different data models into a semantically uniform representation where unique objects such as companies, individuals, products are created with the joined and cleansed information from data residing in these previously separate silos.
Analysts now agree that search 2.0 technology is the emerging driving force behind strategic successes of businesses from every market and every region of the world. If the network has become the computer, search is in the process of becoming its interface. Search is now a primary business interaction tool, and its enormous differentiating potential is still there for those who appreciate its full strategic value.
The main challenge for businesses competing in the online space is no longer their ability to gather enormous amounts of information. The challenge for attracting and retaining customers, and thereby innovative revenue channels, now lies in making search demonstrably relevant to the customer’s intent. This is the core issue that drives researchers like Susan Dumais. The fact that she is confident that search 2.0 will emerge in the next decade is based on our increasing ability to answer a few key questions like: “Who is this customer?” and “What is she and her social network interested in?” “Where is she?” “What device is she using?” Search 2.0 is providing the basis for firms to automatically understand the user’s search habits and preferences, and provide an algorithmic opportunity to engage in smarter communication with customers, partners and employees. As renowned knowledge entrepreneur Esther Dyson offered in a recent interview with FAST: “How can you not do a better job of serving someone if you know them?”
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