Enterprise Search, 2nd Edition

Preface

No matter who they work for or what work they do, most people seem to want their internal search application to work like Google. When you ask what it is about Google Search that makes it so desirable, the response is usually about the very simple interface, the speed with which results are presented, and the high probability that the first page of results will provide at least a good start in the information discovery process. That’s quite an achievement for a company whose business is advertising and not search. The investment in research and development at Google reached $10 billion in 2014, and most of this is spent on nearly 20,000 staff. This effort was largely responsible for Google selling close to $60 billion of advertising in 2014. Does your organization spend 13% of its revenue on search?

There is more to the Google success story than technology. Website owners and contributors spend a considerable amount of time and effort to make sure that Google indexes their content and presents it at the highest possible position in a list of search results. However, internally, there are never any rewards for making sure that information is of the highest quality and presented in a way that will make it easy for the technology to work its retrieval magic. There is rarely more than one lonely person with the responsibility for supporting the search application and making sure that it is tuned to meet user requirements. Investment in search is never seen as a priority.