Occasionally, when you have trouble finding a document with enterprise search, the problem is technical: You type in a word and receive an error message. But the most common problem that SharePoint 2013 users encounter is noise: You type in a word and it brings back every result that matches that word, wherever it occurs in any document, anywhere. That’s a lot of noise to sift through, and you’re probably no closer to finding the document or content you need.
Much of the frustration people have with enterprise search is due to inflated expectations from using consumer search engines. After years of habituation to Google’s advanced semantic search querying in everyday life, it’s hard to accept anything less in an enterprise environment.
Think back to what search was like prior to Google and its competitors. Effective searching required a strategic approach and skillful use of Boolean string characters to refine results. Those who complain about poor enterprise search probably haven’t tried using Boolean strings to find the content they want. At this point, however, expecting an entire company to learn Boolean search is like expecting employees to have mastered perfect cursive.
How should organizations leverage enterprise search to make finding documents and other content easier and more efficient? These five tips help employees use enterprise search effectively.
- Right-size expectations for enterprise search: The idea that you could simply throw content out there and have the search engine do the work isn’t realistic. The Google search engine and algorithms were written to manage a massive scale, and most organizations are only dealing with a couple of terabytes of data. Enterprise search technology has become smarter and more contextual, which makes up for lack of search skills, to a certain degree. While people may benefit from using this technology to improve their searching, what really determines the kinds of results you get is how well they understand (and specify) the context in which they are using a search term.
- Invest upfront in enterprise information management: With tools like SharePoint 2013 and Office 365, it doesn’t take long to set up your enterprise search and document management functions. The technology makes this initial process very fast, but that alone won’t deliver efficient search. Organizations need to invest time in enterprise information management, taking the time to understand what your content is about in order to tag it properly according to your metadata strategy. This planning and implementation provides the foundation for enterprise search to deliver accurate, relevant information to users.
- Develop a metadata and tagging strategy: This isn’t some new idea. After all, tagging has helped people find books in libraries for centuries. People search for information contextually, in general, and search engines are seldom very smart in bringing back contextual results. A metadata strategy helps an organization develop greater context for its information. When applied effectively, tagging increases relevance and accuracy in enterprise search. Tags are doubly useful in that they also serve as filters, used by people to refine results and speed up the search process.
- Keep your content clean: People get frustrated when their search returns outdated information or multiple versions of an old document. These experiences undermine trust and user adoption. The solution is to keep your searchable content clean and high quality. Develop and maintain standards for which content stays live and active in search repositories. One way to accomplish this is by partitioning search scope, so that it only returns content added within a recent time period. People are still able to look for older content, but putting it to one side keeps it from creating noise in your repository of high quality, accurate and up-to-date content.
- Consider adopting auto-classification tools: Over the past 10 years, auto-classification has taken on a key role in enterprise information management, with many Fortune 100 companies adopting it. The value of this technology is that it reduces the employee effort and subjective aspect of manually tagging documents. If you’re using a SharePoint 2013 environment, auto-classification tools are available as add-ons from a number of software developers.
Tagging is only as useful as what goes into it. People tend to contextualize and interpret content very differently, which makes tagging content highly subjective. With auto-classification, the software follows user-defined rules for tagging content. The result is a highly consistent, rule-based assignment of value and classification that improves the effectiveness of enterprise search.
At this point, most people probably aren’t going to work on getting better at using Boolean techniques. Our expectations as consumer search users are so high. Fortunately, the technology has advanced enough to support new expectations. No matter which of these tips you decide to focus on, improving your organization’s enterprise search functionality requires an upfront investment. The return on such investments may come in the form of seconds of regained productivity here and there. For a large organization with significant amounts of documents and content, those savings are often very valuable.
Learn more about implementing enterprise search by contacting Portal Solutions.
