The other week I attended ”From business to buttons” a yearly conference about usability and ‘designing for effect’ held in Malmö. Maria from Findwise was there to talk about ‘search driven design – or why can’t or intranet be more like Google?’, while I had the privilege to walk around talking to attendees about search.
The conference gathered people from a broad range of industries such as telecom, banking, retail etc, but what struck me the most was that no matter how different their business was, their challenges when it came to Enterprise Search where like peas in a pod. The employees just want to find the information they need to do their job in an efficient way. Preferably by typing a simple keyword and get accurate results in a Google-stylish way. Many companies have made investments in Enterprise Search platforms, hoping that this will magically increase findability.
Archive for the ‘Search Watch’ Category
A strategic approach to search
Designing for Search at Business to Buttons
I read an interesting interview where Peter Morville interviewed Luke Wroblewski about Search Patterns. They mentioned some search patterns:
Query Refinement. Most users won’t refine pre-query. They don’t know the size and range of the index. But they will refine post-query, and it provides tremendous value.
Search Assistance. Studies show a correlation between the number of words in the query and satisfaction with results. Search Assist improves query richness. Tips (e.g., did you mean?) improve confidence and suggestions (e.g., related concepts) can shift users into exploratory mode.
Layout. For query refinement tools, we found the right rail is the least discoverable. The top is the most obvious, but suggestions can get in the way of results. That’s why search assist is on top but hidden by default. Other examples include Local and Shopping.
Vertical Search. In verticals such as News and Games, we’ve found that people are fine with two search boxes, one for the vertical and one for web search. In each vertical, we’re selectively exposing structured metadata (e.g., pricing in Autos) to support the decision making process.
It’s always nice when other companies corroborate our findings and experiences.
If you want to know more about these topics and about designing good search experiences come and listen to us talk at Business to Buttons in Malmö. There will be something for the expert as well as those new to search technology. You can also come and talk to us in our monter during the breaks. Hope to see you there!
Microsoft is opening its wallet for search
Three weeks after making a $1.2 billion bid for FAST search & Transfer Microsoft announces that they make a $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo. So far it‘s only an offer which Yahoo’s board and stockholders are considering but, to conclude, Microsoft is serious about going into strategic search markets.
Microsoft bids for Fast
In a recent press release Microsoft has announced an offer to acquire Fast Search and Transfer.
At Findwise we are of course excited about this, as it clearly shows how the world’s leading software vendor has understood the importance of search to the modern enterprise. We are also convinced that the result will be an excellent merger between technical as well as market knowledge of both parties. Since Findwise has a close partnership with Fast and Microsoft you can be sure that we will continue to deliver cutting edge solutions in the future.
Basic enterprise search is commodity – let’s go further! Trends for 2008
So looking ahead, what are the trends for enterprise search 2008?
Well, we have already been talking about Microsoft and IBM and there are a few other vendors (such as Google and Oracle) that have presented ways to develop their enterprise search solutions (looking at clustering, categorisation, taxonomies, entity extraction, visualisation etc.). To conclude: the simple search box is soon commodity – a search solution for enterprises has to go beyond this.
As a result, experts believe that 2008 will become a year with stronger cooperation and more strategic differentiation among the leading vendors. (more…)
Basic enterprise search is commodity – let’s go further! Conclusions of trends 2007
Looking back at the search trends that were predicted for 2007 one can conclude that many of the larger research institutes, such as Forrester and Gartner, made a great forecast.
2007 was supposed to raise the question of 2.0 for search technology within the companies (and it seems like wikis, blogs and collaborative tools was all that we heard about for some months). Further on, there was a discussion of integration with business tools, such as BI and search, to create more powerful ways to extract critical data from several sources. The fact that IBM bought Cognos and FAST Radar says something about what we can expect in the future.
New challenges and leaders in the segment of Enterprise Search 2007
The yearly magic quadrant for Information Access Technology from Gartner has become an important way to evaluate the vendors in Enterprise Search business. The result is presented in a matrix measuring the different players by ability to execute (product, overall viability, customer experience etc.) and the completeness of their vision (offering strategy, innovation etc.). The vendors are then positioned as niche players (a rather crowded spot), visionaries, challengers and leaders.
For the last couple of years the upper right corner, which includes the leaders, has been a yearly fight between FAST Search & Transfer, Autonomy, Verity (which was bought by Autonomy in 2005) and Endeca.
However, the magic quadrant for 2007 shows that there is a substantial change in the market and two new leaders as well as two new large vendors on the challenging spot are represented. (more…)
Search is fun
Luckily, search is not all finding critical business information, it also is the ticket to finding new enjoyments. Recently Yahoo has launched a new audio search that lets you search multiple music libraries, including for example iTunes, containing millions of songs. In the search result you can see who provided the song and also listen to a free 30- second clip. (more…)
Find people with Spock
Today, Google is the main source for finding information on the web, regardless of the kind of information you’re looking for. Let it be company information, diseases, or people – Google is used for finding everything. While Google is doing a great job in finding relevant information, it can be good to explore alternatives that are concentrated upon a more specific target.
In the previous post, Karl blogged about alternatives to Google that provides a different user interface. Earlier, Caroline has enlightened us about search engines that leads to new ways on how to use search. Today I am going to continue on these tracks and tell you a bit about a new challenger, Spock, and my first impressions of using it.
Interesting new search features
Out on the web there are a large number of small search engines that try to stand out and maybe take some of the market shares from Google.
I would like to introduce some of them in order to help other realize that search can (and should) be a bit more then a search bar and a list of hits. A number of these alternative search engines have focused on the visual presentation of the search result in interesting ways. For example the search engine quintura uses tag clouds of related terms and concepts to the original query.
A slightly different approach has been taken by mnemomap and webbrain that presents related concepts in a graph instead. The other part is to visually show the divisions of the search results into different categories so they can easily be navigated through but also to give a quick overview of the subject, examples of that can be seen at e.g. mooter and kooltorch. Finally I would also like to mention kartOO that have, in my opinion, gone one step further and even presents the links to the search results with images and icons. (more…)
