Enterprise Search

Chapter 2. Enterprise Search Is Difficult

Most people think that search is easy. All you have to do is type a word or two into the query box on Google or Bing. In a fraction of a second, thousands, if not millions, of results are ready to review. You don’t know and don’t care about how this was accomplished, and for searching the Internet that’s acceptable. Even if you knew all about PageRank, BigTable, Markov chains and the teleportation matrix it would be of no value in using Google and the situation is similar with Bing. The nice thing about searching the web is that we are easily satisfied. Even if you don’t find quite what you are looking for you will find something close enough to be useful and forget about the initial disappointment.

Enterprise search is much more challenging. From the evidence presented in Chapter 1 it is clear that there is a significant dissatisfaction with enterprise search applications. One of the reasons for this is that the height of the satisfaction barrier. If you are looking for a specific document or specific information and cannot find it then your satisfaction is zero. Finding something roughly similiar is rarely good enough to risk your career on.

When it comes to enterprise search it really does make a lot of sense to know something about how search works. However before we start to look inside the boxes in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 in this chapter we will look at some typical experiences with enterprise search and then in Chapter 3 consider some ...