Fixing Enterprise Search, Part 2 of 2

Joe Hilger - Fixing Enterprise Search, Part 2 of 2

Video Transcript

Action-Oriented Search is an Enterprise Knowledge term, and it's a different way of looking at search. Too often, people think about search as a tool to help people find information, and while that sounds right, that's actually not what makes search really work. You have to change your mindset. Action-Oriented Search is when you start to think about not "what you're searching for," but "what people do with that information." If you really step back and think about how and why people search, they search not because they want to go search for something, they search because they have a task or a job to do and they don't have the information they need to get it done.

Too much is in IT's hands. IT can't continually change search, so what we like to do is we like to use things like best bets or promotions, whatever your search engine calls it, to allow search administrators, more end users or business people, to say: "when this search term comes in, I want that at the top of the list, that should be right up front and first for this term because that is what's most important." What that does is it means that search can continually change over time as the business continuously looks at reports or other metrics and says "Oh, wow, people search on this term a lot, are they finding what we think they should?"

Well, the good news is, part of the challenge, which is pulling together those different disparate pieces of information that look different and act different, the tools on the market are much better now, they're much more mature, and they do a much better job of that, so that back-end challenge is something that you can do a little more [easily] with some of the right tools and some of the more current tools on the search market.

The second part is how to make sure that we request things the right way, and this is where, "I just want a search like Google" isn't good enough, so organizations needs to learn better ways to ask for what they need, and they need to understand how search works, and how they can ask for search that really enables the actions they're going to take.

Continue to focus on Action-Oriented Search. Find that new piece of content that needs Action-Oriented Search applied to it, maybe a different design as to the way we show the results or what you do with it. That's number one. Number two, we want organizations to focus on metrics, so it's metrics about not only your search and what people are finding, but also on the taxonomy. Are people using those facets? Which facets work best [and] get the most clicks, and which don't? Also, what things aren't people finding through navigation or browse of taxonomy that suggest that maybe there's more taxonomy elements we need so people can narrow it to the right results.

When you change your mindset from one of "using search to find" to one of "using search to act," you're going to see huge changes in the way your search works and the way your users' experience with search is.

Видео Fixing Enterprise Search, Part 2 of 2 канала Enterprise Knowledge, LLC