KMWorld 2010 Reflections: Search is a Journey Not a Destination

Two weeks ago me, Ludvig Johansson and Christopher Wallström attended KMWorlds quadruple conference in Washington D.C. The conference consisted of four different conferences; KMWorld, Enterprise Search Summit, Taxonomy Bootcamp and SharePoint Symposium. I focused on Enterprise Search Summit and SharePoint Symposium and Christopher mainly covered Taxonomy Bootcamp as well as the Enterprise Search Summit. (Christopher will soon write a blog post about this as well.)

During the conferences there where some good quality content, however most of it was old news with speakers mainly focusing on outputs of their own products. This was disappointing since I had hoped to see the newest and coolest solutions within my area. Speakers presented systems from their corporations, where the newest and coolest functionality they described was shallow filters on a Google Search Appliance. From my perspective this is not new or cool. I would rather consider this standard functionality in today’s search solutions.

However, some sessions where really good. Daniel W. Rasmus talked about the Evolution of Search in quite a fun and thoughtful way. One thing he wanted to see in the near future was more personalization of search. Search needs to know the user and adapt to him/her and not simply use a standardized algorithm. As Rasmus sad it: “my search engine is not that in to me”. This is, as I would put it, spot on how we see it at Findwise. Today’s customer wants standard search with components that have existed for years now. It’s time for search to take the next step in the evolution and for us to start deliver Findabillity solutions adapted to your needs as an individual. In the line of this, Rasmus ended with another good quote: “Don’t let your search vendors set your exceptions to low”. I think this speaks for it self more or less. If we want contextual search then we should push the vendors out there to start deliver!

Another good session was delivered by Ellen Feaheny on how to utilize both old and new systems smarter. It was from this session the title of this post origins, “It’s a journey not a destination”. I thought this sums up what we feel everyday in our projects. It’s common that customers want to see projects to have a clear start and end. However with search and Findability we see it as a journey. I can even go as far to say it’s a journey without an end. We have customers coming and complaining about their search; saying “It doesn’t work anymore” or “The content is old”, to give two examples. The problem is that search is not a one time problem that you solve and then never have to think about again. If you don’t work with your search solution and treat search as a journey, continually improve relevance, content and invest time in search analytics your solution will soon get dusty and not deliver what your employees or customers wants.

Search is a journey not a destination.

Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) and Enterprise Search is a never ending story

A number of years ago Gartner coined “Biggle” – which was an expression for BI meeting Google. Back then a number of BI vendors, among them Cognos and SAS, claimed that they were working with enterprise search strategically (e.g. became Google One-box partners). Search vendors, like FAST, Autonomy and IBM also started to cooperate with companies such as Cognos. “The Adaptive Warehouse” and “BI for the masses” soon became buzzwords that spread in the industry.

The skeptics claimed that enterprise search never would be good at numbers and that BI would never be good with text.

Since then a lot a lot has happened and today the major vendors within Enterprise Search all claim to have BI solutions that can be fully integrated (and the other way around – BI solutions that can integrate with enterprise search).

The aim is the same now as back then:  to provide unified access to both structured (database) and unstructured (content) corporate information. As FAST wrote in a number of ‘Special Focus’:

“Users should have access to a wide variety of data from just one, simple search interface, covering reports, analysis, scorecards, dashboards and other information from the BI side, along with documents, e-mail and other forms of unstructured information.”

And of course, this seems appealing to customers. But does access to all information really make us more likely to take the right decisions in terms of Business Intelligence. Gartner is in doubt.

Nigel Rayner, research vice president at Gartner Inc, says that:

”The problem isn’t that they (users) don’t have access to information or tools; they already have too much information, and that’s just in the structured BI world. Now you want to couple it with unstructured data? That’s a whole load of garbage coming from the outside world”.

But he also states that search can be used as one part of BI:

“Part of the problem with traditional BI is that it’s very focused on structured information. Search can help with getting access to the vast amount of structured information you have”

Looking at the discussions going on in forums, in blogs and in the research domain most people seem to agree with Gartner’s view: enterprise search and business intelligence makes a powerful combination, but the integrations needs to be made with a number of things in mind:

Data quality

As mentioned before, if one wants to make unstructured and structured information available as a complement to BI it needs to be of a good quality. Knowing that the information found is the latest copy and written by someone with knowledge of the area is essential. Bad information quality is a threat to an Enterprise Search solution, to a combined BI- and search solution it can be devastating. Having Content Lifecycles in place (reviewing, deleting, archiving etc) is a fundamental prerequisite.

Data analysis

Business Intelligence in traditionally built on pre-thought ideas of what data the users need, whereas search gives access to all information in an ad-hoc manner. To combine these two requires a structured way of analyzing the data. If the unstructured information is taken out of its context there is a risk that decisions are built on assumptions and not fact.

BI for the masses?

The old buzzwords are still alive, but the question mark remains. If one wants to give everyone access to BI-data it has to be clear what the purpose is. Giving people a context, for example combining the latest sales statistics with searches for information about the ongoing marketing activities serves a purpose and improves findability. Just making numbers available does not.

enterprise search and business intelligence dashboard

Business intelligence and enterprise search in a combined dashboard – vision or reality within a near future?

So, to conclude: Gartner’s vision of “Biggle” is not yet fulfilled. There are a number of interesting opportunities for the business to create findability solutions that combines business intelligence and enterprise search, but the strategies for adopting it needs to be developed in order to create the really interesting cases.

Have you come across any successful enterprise search and business intelligence integrations? What is your vision? Do you think the integration between the two is a likely scenario?

Please let us know by posting your comments.

It’s soon time for us to go on summer vacation.

If you are Swedish, Nicklas Lundblad from Google had an interesting program about search (Sommar i P1) the other day, which is available as a podcast.

Have a nice summer all of you!

Query Suggestions Help Users Get Unstuck

Several papers at the HCIR09 workshop touched on the topic of query suggestions. Chirag Shah and Gary Marchionini presented a poster about query reuse in exploratory search tasks and Diane Kelly presented results from two different studies that examined people’s use of query suggestions and how usage varied depending on topic difficulty. (Their papers are available for download as part of the proceedings from the workshop.)

According to Shah and Marchionini users often search for the same things. They reuse their previous queries e.g. search for the same things multiple times. Users use their previous searches to refind information and also to expand or further filter their previous searches by adding one or more keywords. There is also a significant overlap between what different users search for suggesting that users have a tendency to express their information needs in similar ways. These results support the idea that query suggestions can be used to help users formulate their query.  Yahoo and YouTube  are two of the systems that uses this technique, where users get suggestions of queries and how they can add more words to their query based on what other users have searched for.

Diane Kelly concludes that users use query suggestion both by typing in the same thing as shown in the suggestion and by clicking on it. Users also tend to use more query suggestions when searching for difficult topics. Query suggestions help users get “unstuck” when they are searching for information.  It is however hard to know whether query suggestions actually return better results. The users expectation and preferences do have an effect on user satisfaction as well. User generated query suggestions are also found to be better than query suggestions generated by the search system. So the mere expectation that the query suggestions will help a user could have an positive effect on his or hers experience…

Query suggestions are meant to help the users formulate a good query that will provide them with relevant results. Query suggestions can also work as with yahoo search where query suggestions both suggest more words to add to the query but also provides the users with suggestions for other related concepts to search for. So searching for Britney Spears will for example suggest the related search for Kevin Federline (even though they are now divorced) and searching for enterprise search will suggest concepts such as relevance, information management and off course the names of the different search vendors.

If you apply this to the enterprise search setting the query suggestion could provide the user with several different kinds of help. Combining the user’s previous searches with things other users searched for but also providing suggestions for recommended queries or concepts. The concepts will be high quality information and suggestions controlled by the team managing the search application. It is a way of combining quick links or best bets with query suggestions and a way to hopefully improve the experienced value of the query suggestions. The next step then is to work with these common queries that users search for and make sure that they return relevant results, but that is an entirely different topic…

What Differentiates a Good Search Engine from a Bad One?

That was one of the questions the UIE research group asked themselves when conducting a study of on-site search. One of the things they discovered was that the choice of search engine was not as important as the implementation. Most of the big search vendors were found in both the top sites and the bottom sites.

So even though the choice of vendor influences what functionality you can achieve and the control you have over your content there are other things that matter, maybe even more. Because the best search engine in the world will not work for you unless you configure it properly.

According to Jared Spool there are four kinds of search results:

  • ‘Match relevant results’ – returns the exact thing you were looking for.
  • ‘Zero results’ – no relevant results found.
  • ‘Related results’ – i.e. search for a sweater and also get results for a cardigan. (If you know that a cardigan is a type of sweater you are satisfied. Otherwise you just get frustrated and wonder why you got a result for a cardigan when you searched for a sweater).
  • ‘Wacko results – the results seem to have nothing in common with your query.

So what did the best sites do according to Jared Spool and his colleagues?
They returned match relevant results, and they did not return 0 results for searches.

So how do you achieve that then? We have previously written about the importance of content refinement and information quality. But what do you do when trying to achieve good search results with your search engine? And what if you do not have the time or knowledge to do a proper content tuning process?

Well, the search logs are a good way to start. Start looking at them to identify the 100 most common searches and the results they return. Are they match relevant results? It is also a good idea to look at the searches that return zero results and see if there is anything that can be done to improve those searches as well.

Jared Spool and his colleagues at UIE mostly talk about site search for e-commerce sites. For e-commerce sites bad search results mean loss of revenue while good search results hopefully give an increase in revenue (if other things such as check out do not fail). Working with intranet search the implications are a bit different.

With intranet search solutions the searches can be more complex when information not items, is what users are searching for. It might not be as easy to just add synonyms or group similar items to achieve better search results. I believe that in such a complex information universe, proper content tuning is the key to success. But looking at the search logs is a good way for you to start. And me and my colleagues here at Findwise can always help you how to get the most out of your search solution.

A Change of Focus to Search Driven; or Control vs Openness Part Two

The Shift Towards Portals with Search Driven Functionality

A lot of the people I meet in my work use these new web 2.0 tools daily. They ask me why metadata and taxonomies have to be so complicated when you can do “that web 2.0 stuff” with tagging. They say they prefer “the easy way” and prefer folksonomies over structures; they don’t think they can trust the structures anyway. People, who would like to work in an organization like Charlies.

Traditionally intranets are about control; we want to control what information people get and when and how they get it, instead of trying to make sure that people have the information they need when they need it.

I did some sketches for a search driven portal the other day. One of the comments I got was: “Wow! Why can’t we do that?” Actually, people are doing that. There are dozens of services out there like iGoogle and Superstart; all about customizing the experience for each user. This is like the intranet I want!

In order to achieve this, the companies need a change of focus. It is not about having control over every detail, or about just seizing control. It’s about finding a way to manage communication and make it easier for people to find what they want when they need it.

The search vendors have started to realize that. There is a shift towards portals with search driven functionality.

The design is not static, but reflects what is new and important to you, the specific user.
There are no menus in several levels; instead information about current events and information about what has happened since the last time you visited, take up the information space. Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs can be used internally to improve communication and collaboration.

Are you looking for something special? Search for it! You don’t need to know where it is in order to find the information you are looking for.

This is off course the vision, where few organizations have dared to go. But there are off course exceptions to this. I have been working in a project where there is no fear of seizing control over every little detail. The aim is instead to understand how to best support the users in their work, using enterprise 2.0 tools and search as a vital part of the solution. I would like to see more organizations like Charlie’s…

Using Search for Web and Enterprise 2.0? Plan for the Future!

Buzzwords such as ‘the long tail’, ‘user generated content’ and ‘web 2.0’ has been around for some time now, but does it automatically mean that everyone understands the way that technology is heading? And what happens with search?

If you haven’t seen the rather old, but brilliant video The machine is us/ing us on Youtube you should. If you have, you should take a look at the updated version.

When working with search on a daily basis one tries to get behind the fuzzy words to see how blogs, wikis, RSS, mash-ups and social tagging among other things will affect the way we interact and do business in the future. Linking Wikipedia to these words is only one example of knowledge sharing that wasn’t possible a few years ago.

The tools that the new web 2.0 development provides us with helps us create and gather more information than ever. As the amount of information increases rapidly, according to Gartner an average company doubles (!) its information every 6-18 months, the need for efficient search solutions becomes crucial in order to handle the vast amounts of data.

All search vendors claim that they will be able to provide effective search for these purposes. As a customer you should ask yourself; what is the future need of my business? Do I need a search solution that provides support for basic functionality such as spellchecking and static relevance adjustments? Is there a need for more advanced functionality that increases cross-functional sharing in the organisation such as dynamic navigators and common workspaces? Do I want to use search to increase knowledge sharing powered by web 2.0 tools?

An interesting and short debate presentation can be found here. In conclusion; Different stages of maturity require different approaches to achieve different outcomes.

These questions may seem to be looking too far ahead? I can say for sure that by asking the right questions from the beginning you can save yourself a lot of time and the company a lot of money (and use your solutions for present as well as future needs).

By knowing your users, your organization and its future you can make search solutions that help enable knowledge discovery, sharing, and connection, which in the end is what web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 is all about.