Powerful search engines allow people to take advantage of the Internet in ways that would be impossible if they had to browse information as they did in the World Wide Web’s infancy. By the same token, good enterprise search functionality is an important component today for businesses. An article from CMSWire describes how 2013 was the year that search functionality became critical for businesses and offers some predictions for 2014.
SharePoint is such a popular platform that its search capabilities deserve special mention. SharePoint 2013 search is leaps and bounds above the integrated search platform from SharePoint 2010. It has much more sophisticated search algorithms for indexing to improve performance and accuracy.
There’s no doubt that if you’re planning to upgrade to SharePoint 2013 you’ll benefit from an improved search engine. It’s very powerful and certainly improves the SharePoint user experience. One great feature noted in the article is the ability to create customized searches for different groups of users. Getting the most out of this will likely require some user research and refinement of the searches over time, but that will be well worth the effort.
In 2013, there were plenty of discussions about Big Data, and what a challenge it would be to mine all of that information. We didn’t hear quite as much about unstructured data, but it’s still a very prevalent concern as far as how to retain that knowledge and allow organizations to mine unstructured data for compliance, legal and productivity reasons. An SAP survey mentioned in the article found that at least 25 percent of data — and sometimes up to 50 percent — is unstructured. Integrating structured and unstructured data can help organizations to make the best decisions.
Finally, in 2014, cross-device search and continuous information seeking will be two of the most important trends. Cross-device search describes the ability to start a search on one device and then continue it on other devices, such as starting on a smartphone and completing it on a PC. A second trend for 2014 discussed in the article is the increasing prevalence of “continuous searching,” where searches are conducted by multiple users in a collaborative environment.
Source: CMSWire, December 2013
