During the autumn we have been trying to keep our customers and others up to date with the search world by hosting breakfast seminars. By benchmarking enterprise search and sharing experiences and discussing with others the participants have taken giant leaps in understanding what search can deliver in true value. The same goes for sharing experiences between companies, where you often find yourself struggling with the same problems, regardless of business or company size.

We have been discussing how enterprise search can help intranets, extranets, web sites and support centers to capitalize on their knowledge. Some of the things that have been discussed in regards to benchmarking enterprise search.

Business Cases

• How can search help companies save 100 million SEK/year?
• How do you count return on investment (ROI) for search?

Search Functionality

How and why should you work with:

• Key Matches to promote certain content (similar to Google’s sponsored links on the web)
• Synonyms (to make sure that the end-users language corresponds to the corporate without having to change the information)
• Query completion and suggestion to give the user an overview of what other people have been searching for when they start to type (similar to Apples web site search).

End User Experience

• How can different interfaces serve different information needs and user-groups?
• How does your user interface serve your end-users?

Information Quality

• Do taxonomies and folksonomies help us find information faster?
• Can search be used to improve the quality of your content?

During the spring we will continue to hold seminars, keeping you up-to date. If you’re not on our mailing list, please look at our Findability Events and register for our events.

During Wednesday and Thursday this week we will be attending a Ability conference to discuss search. Hope to see you there!