Are you happy with the search experiences you have on websites, on your corporate intranet, or at support sites while looking for answers to your problems? My own experience, and my work with clients and their customers, tells me that very few search projects are successful. People can’t find what they need, and they waste a lot of time while failing to find it. Search projects fail for all of the reasons any project fails, but there are a few obstacles that loom especially large for search. Understanding the big mistakes of search can help you avoid them—or at least put a name to your current misery. We’ll go further than naming what ails you by outlining a path to sidestep the big mistakes and offering advice on how to escape the holes you’re already in.  Our advice is primarily for project and program leaders. The big problems all belong to you.  [Download the complete PDF.]

Culture Sets the Terrain for Search Problems

Search problems occur across the project life cycle. Some problems are entirely predictable and mundane, common to all types of projects: project management gone awry, technology instability, failing to reach closure on requirements and so on.

What makes search different from other projects and sets the stage for the big problems to come is what amounts to two cultural issues. We’re not going to suggest that you take on your corporate culture. But you need to understand how culture impacts search success because you’ll be struggling against the cultural tide as long as you are working on findability.

First, most companies do not understand how to be effective content producers. In fact, most companies don’t believe they are publishers. They think they make diesel engines, software, or chips or sell fashion or building supplies. However, most companies have publishing oper­ations, just as they have HR, accounting, and logistics operations. People have lots of mental models and role models for these core competencies, yet they have little idea how to be content publishers. Of this, there is wide­spread ignorance and even opposition. Without the habits and structures that support content publishing—and findability—your information collections will not be in tidy shape. In fact, they will be a mess, so people won’t find the information they need (and they won’t understand why). What’s far worse, people do not understand the tasks and roles that must be funded in order to achieve the find-ability that the organization needs and, as a result, attempts to secure funding will fall on stubborn deaf ears.

The second issue is as much environmental as cultural. Search is an arena undergoing tremendous change. For the past 5 years, there has been great change in search usage: what people use it for, what questions they expect to answer, what kinds of information they index, what sorts of people use search, and in what context they use it.  Expectations have risen steadily as search engines have become more competent. We are on an event boundary, and search engines are about to blossom into every appli­cation you buy. This will have a phenomenal impact on user productivity, but it will also drive expectations and demand. The bottom line is that it is impossible to guess who will use the search service you are building and what questions they will expect it to answer. Nailing down requirements becomes extraordinarily difficult: pilgrims in pursuit of the unknowable.

Project and Program Lifecycle Pain Points

Search projects follow a classic life cycle. But if search projects are to deliver great search, they need to become, or be supported by, search programs. Search projects are like planting grass. Search programs are like getting the grass to grow, keeping it mowed, and controlling the weeds. My life cycle addresses the search program life cycle, which typically starts witha successful search implementation project. Following the implementation, the search program kicks in, with the ongoing activities of monitoring and managing quality and findability. The concluding step, expanding the program, occurs when your program is successful. Your monitoring and analysis indicate what needs to be done, and your metrics prove the worth of doing it.

In the search project and program life cycle, there are four phases that we observe to be particularly difficult with search, each with its own problems, which are summarized in the accompanying table.

The solutions to these problems are not simple or easy to perform. You can’t solve them alone; they require a range of talents and roles. However, we can offer some insights into how to deal with each.

Vision

The earliest mistake in your search project or program isvirtually unrecoverable—the failure to establish and communicate the rightvision.  If you fail at this point, the project will not succeed, and you willprobably not be able to resuscitate it. In establishing your vision, you mustset a significant, desirable, achievable goal. To communicate it, you mustpresent a simple, familiar, and evocative story that helps anchor people to theproject, tell them what to expect, and help them think through what will happenand what it will mean. Here are some examples: 

• <!--[if !supportLists]--><!--[endif]-->Customers will find the best product for theirsituation in less than 5 minutes.
• A customer will be presented an answer to a productusage question in 1 minute. Ninety percent of these usage questions will beanswered online in 2008.
• A customer with a problem will be on the path toresolution in 2 minutes or less from our website. Forty percent of resolutionswill be unassisted in 2008, growing to 80% by 2010.
• <!--[if !supportLists]-->Eightypercent of employees will use the internal knowledgebase at least weekly.
• <!--[if !supportLists]-->Notice themetric attached to each vision. This will come in handy later.
  

The vision is based on rational decisions, but it takespassionate commitment to communicate the vision and convince people that it isimportant and right. Ideally, the project lead or program head is theproselytizer and the executive sponsor opens the doors for the pitch. Plan todeliver your pitch daily for the first year of your program and weekly for therest of your tenure.

If you’ve already gotten this wrong, this is a devastatingmistake, akin to damaging your brand. The recovery will require beginning freshwith a new project, a new project name, and a new project leader.

Download the Free PDF (including all charts).

Requirements and Selection

Requirements are notoriously difficult to get right, forwell-known reasons. The big mistake with search require­ments is thinking too narrowly. Getting the vision right helps set the scope, but our two cultural issues come into play creating such a strong tide you can’t help but want to narrow your profile to swim against it more effectively. The breadth of the real search requirements can be overwhelming, and as a result, the most common mistake is to narrow the requirements too far. This is especially true if the project team’s purview only extends to a small cluster of information with no clout or even access rights to broaden the search index. You build the service based on the scope that you own and end up creating a service that no one wants to use. Still, to be practical, you have to start something that you can finish, and quickly.

The best approach to this conundrum, then, is to act locally but think more globally. As long as you have an outlet from the narrow searchs ervice that will allow you to achieve the sophisticated, high volume,integrated search you are highly likely to need, then it is OK to start small. Ask, how does this service become the most sophis­ticated and scalable service you can imagine? How will you enlist more support for a broader service? Can the technology support the broadest goals? Will the technolo­gy integrate with all the other specialized search engines that the enterprise already owns or is about to buy?

If you’re already underway with a project that is too narrow, you need to set the stage for an outlet or opening. Consider your seekers and their questions. You build a service for people. Who are they and what are their problems? What information is needed to answer their questions? Who owns the information? Start scoping out what is really needed for your audiences. Declare the requirements, costs, and so on. Tell people the shortcomings of the current proj­ect for their constituencies. Calculate budgets. Talk about vision. Start cultivating allies with other information own­ers and audience advocates to support a follow-up project.

Technology selection is the other big mistake at this life cycle phase. It is very easy to buy search technology you’ll have to throw away.People mistakenly buy technology that is too simplistic, perhaps because they’ve taken too narrow a view of requirements. Very few search applicationscan be satisfied with keyword retrieval. Keyword looks great if you’ve got no search at all, but after even a few days of using it, people will be dissatisfied. You will need technology that identifies concepts, extracts metadata, clusters similar items, and supports navigation by successive refinement. Also, it’s important to understand that when you buy "search," you need more than just indexing and retrieval. You need interfaces to manage synonyms, concepts, metadata, reporting, analysis, ranking, pro­motion, and merchandising. IT can’t build and maintain these interfaces and functions, despite the lure of simple, easy answers like open source Lucene. (For adetailed list of enterprise search requirements, download my Enterprise Search Planning and Evaluation Framework, www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=724.)

If you’ve already got simplistic technology, your only choices are to scrap it or to invest heavily in content. Great organization and outstanding process can make up for lousy search technology. However, it is a good idea to track what it costs you to make content findable because this money might well be better spent on improved search technology. Make sure you don’t end up investing any more money on simplistic technology—for example, getting an enterprise license to a product that doesn’t meet your requirements. Lobby to buy smart search engines for every project. 

Findability Policies and Procedures

Information is created and managed across the enterprise. Findability is almost never managed across the enterprise, or managed at all, and this is a big mistake. Again, this is a result of culture. People don’t know that findability needs to be managed, how it is effectively managed, or who should manage it.

The solution to this problem is a network of concerned citizens and impassioned volunteers. This cadre must contain people who understand the users and their compli­cated questions; the key collections,what they contain, and how they are organized; representatives of the big content producers; collection owners; and advocates for various audiences, such as the voice of the customer director or the usability program manager.

It’s your job to recruit them all. (Yup, dozens, scores, even hundreds of them.) I recommend you meet with each of them, step them through your vision pitch, and then tell them all about the Findability Directorate (or whatever attractive name you devise for the network). The directorate will share project plans and success stories; establish authority files, file-naming conventions, procedures for communicating findability problems to information owners, and policy for when to archive and remove content; develop strategy for handling metadata inconsistencies across collections,and so on. Then,you’ll ask your recruit about her area of expertise, listening carefully for oppor­tunities to help each other. Then you’ll persuade her to join. You’ll have enthusiastic recruits, skeptical recruits, and refuseniks. Focus your efforts on those who will join because a few months down the road, you’ll have the success-driven clout to get the participation you need.

Initially, the group will come together informally, and policies and procedures will be informal as well. At some point, a combination of your persuasion, your recruits’ enthusiasm, and your recruits’ accomplishments will enable you to formalize the function. The recruits’ efforts will become part of their MBOs rather than a hobby that distracts from their "real" work. Getting the findability efforts funded will depend in part on your success with the next big problem: establishing and communicating meaningful metrics.

Postimplementation Phases

There are two key mistakes in the phases after search engine technology implementation: failure to establish and communicate meaningful metrics and failure to invest in improving the quality and value of the search service.

These two problems cross all four of the postimple­mentation steps, and they are intertwined. If you fail to establish meaningful metrics, people don’t know how well the search service is delivering its promise, how much remains to be done, and what value is being (or remains to be) delivered. As a result, attempts to invest in improvement—in the search experience, information quality, breadth and depth of the search service—repeatedly fail.

What are the right metrics? Ideally, your vision defined your metrics for you. In our vision examples, we had metrics for finding answers in a minute; 40% of resolutions unassisted; 90% of questions answered online.You chose this metric because it had significance to the organization. Use it unceasingly. Tell anyone who will listen that only 28% of resolutions are unassisted, and the 12% shortfall cost the company $36.2 million this year. But the successful online resolutions saved $84.6 million, and online resolution increased by 2% last year. And, by the way, here’s the plan for increasing it by 4% next year, which will save $11.85 million. People just adore precision. (I’ve covered this topic in detail in Search Experience Metrics, http:// psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=730.)

Ideally, as in this example, the metrics themselves signify value. Other examples are revenue per search, conversion from search, and person-hours saved. If you can’t use a metric that contains business value, look for one that is closely associated with business value. For example, successful customer searches could be effective in an organization that placed great value on customer experience. First-touch resolutions mean a lot in customer service. By the way, you will likely need a series of metrics that are specific to applications or audiences in order to establish the value of the search service. Call deflection works in customer service appli­cations, whereas customer abandonment from the product search results page gets attention over in the ecommerce team.

It’s also very useful to have a single number that people use to evaluate search overall. For this I recommend tracking searches per visit, with a goal of less than one and a steady downward trend. No one wants to search. We all want to find.

Being successful with search projects and programs requiresa bit of swimming against the tide and a lot of working the system. As a leader, it’s hard not to get sucked into the day-to-day demands of your project. What we’ve tried to do is highlight how important the bigger, "softer" problems are. The softer problems— vision, requirements, metrics—become the nuts and bolts problems of not having the assistance, resources, and funding that you need to achieve your goals. Our prescriptions provide concrete tactics for dealing with the problems and for avoiding the mistakes that lead to failed search projects.

Download the Free PDF.

About the Author

SUSAN E. ALDRICH is a senior VP and senior consultantat the Patricia Seybold Group, Inc. Aldrich manages the Search, Navigation, and Discovery Research Practice, with a personal research focus on customer self-service, information management, and technologies and practices for monitoring, measuring, and managing the Quality of Customer ExperienceSM (QCE)

Thomson Scientific, part of The Thomson Corporation and provider of information solutions to the worldwide research and business communities, and Collexis Holdings Inc., a developer of high definition search and knowledge discovery software, announced plans to join together Collexis' Knowledge Dashboard with Thomson Scientific's Web of Science to create a custom data mining solution for the research community. Called the Thomson Collexis Dashboard, it is intended to provide knowledge discovery for the academic and government R&D communities.

Thomson also announced the addition of Derwent World Patents Index and scientific literature, including Web of Science and Inspec, to Thomson Innovation its new intellectual property research and analysis solution. In addition to English translations of Japanese full text patent data, Thomson Innovation now includes editorially enhanced English-language patent abstracts for China, coupled with additional Asian coverage.

(www.thomson.com, www.collexis.com)

Northern Light has launched its second major release of MI Analyst, an automated "meaning extraction" application designed specifically for market intelligence, market research, and product research. MI Analyst 2.0 adds many new "facets" (categories of terms) by which the software can analyze search results, automatically extracting meaning from internal and research documents, licensed secondary research, news stories and web sources. Joining the previously released facets (Companies, Venture-Funded Companies, IT Technologies, IT Markets), new and expanded facets include Government Agencies, Industries, Business Issues and Strategic Scenarios. Also new in MI Analyst 2.0 is a facility to improve the value of search results based on the proximity of specified terms or phrases to each other and to any of the terms in any of the facets in MI Analyst. With the 2.0 release, MI Analyst expands beyond its roots in the IT sector to the pharmaceutical industry research. New facets relevant to pharmaceuticals include Human Anatomy, Diseases, Drugs, Cells, Cell Receptors, Proteins, Genes, Enzymes, Pharmaceutical Markets, Life Sciences Scenarios and Research Strategies and Therapeutic Approaches. MI Analyst is immediately vailable from Northern Light as an added-value option for SinglePoint enterprise market research portals, and as an integrated capability within Analyst Direct(TM), Northern Light's subscription-based market research search engine.

(www.northernlight.com) 

The e-discovery process at law firms can be plagued by inefficient and expensive redundancies. The Chicago-based law firm of Barack Ferrazzano Kirschbaum & Nagelberg wanted to streamline workloads and reduce the risks and expense associated with e-discovery. After an evaluation period, the firm decided to deploy the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform from Clearwell Systems to analyze and review electronically stored information (ESI).

According to Clearwell, the law firm did a hands-on evaluation of a large data set related to a case, and found it achieved a 70 percent reduction in ESI deemed relevant, resulting in much quicker process times and significant cost savings.

"Once the results of our evaluation were in, there wasn't a single person at our firm who was not completely convinced of the ROI we and our clients would gain from the technology," says John Jelderks, IT director at the law firm. "The Clearwell E-Discovery Platform is an extremely efficient and powerful solution, especially given the significance of electronic evidence to litigation today. By allocating less time determining whether a piece of information is relevant, and spending more time analyzing how a message can make or break a case, the solution plays a critical role in the lives of our practitioners and the outcome for our clients."

Among the features that attracted the law firm to the solution were its advanced analytics and de-duplicating capabilities. Clearwell reports that after a data set has been culled, the software enables users to view data in discussion threads and classify documents into relevant categories, further speeding the document analysis and review process, and allowing attorneys to work collaboratively on a case.

Another factor in the deployment was the system's intuitive user interface. Clearwell says it gives lawyers and paralegals autonomy from IT to rapidly analyze documents, follow an e-mail discussion to pinpoint exactly who knew what and when, and quickly tag and export relevant documents to litigation support databases.

Peladon Software has announced plans to partner with Content Analyst through the integration of Content Analyst's search technology with its DocXP's Intelligent Auto-Redaction software module.

The move is designed to aid in the prevention of identity theft, protect data and ensure the privacy of sensitive information. The solution will provide organizations with a sophisticated document processing system with a fast and accurate method for finding data within large volumes of documents and then redacting, or removing, sensitive data from those documents.

Peladon Software is the supplier of an extensive line of document processing systems and automated information capture solutions, including the DocXP document classification, data security, data extraction and verification software modules.

NextPage, a provider of compliance and information risk management, announced the availability of its new NextPage Information Tracking Platform. The NextPage platform supports the company's flagship application, the NextPage Document Retention, as well as new applications that intend to address the different elements of risk associated with unstructured and unmanaged data that resides at the edge of the enterprise--hard drives and scattered shared drives. The NextPage Information Tracking Platform is optimized to help manage information risk at the edge through several categories of applications: Proactive Tracking tracks files through their entire document lifecycle--moves, copies, saves, renames and emails; Classification can be maintained for every document in an enterprise, from the moment of creation; and Built into the NextPage Information Tracking Platform is a Monitoring Module that can create custom reports and charts to monitor compliance and facilitate follow-up by administrators or custodians.

(www.nextpage.com)
 

Quintura, a visual-based search engine for browsing and discovery-type search, has launched its search engine for individual Web sites and blogs.

The company says Quintura for site search delivers the same navigation principle to site and blog search that Quintura.com brings to Web search, that is, browsing content through a search cloud that brings a user deeper into the query with every click or mouse over. Instead of presenting results in a list, Quintura puts together the cloud of related terms and allows users to browse results by topics. The Quintura search cloud on a site or blog displays semantic concepts from indexed pages. The site or blog user gets search results by either mousing over or clicking keywords and phrases in the cloud.

Hot Neuron LLC, an information retrieval software and services company, announced the release of version 1.0 of its Clustify document clustering software, aimed at helping corporations and law firms explore, organize, and tag large document sets. Clustify is designed to group documents into clusters of related documents. It identifies keywords for each cluster, giving insight into the document set. It also allows the user to create a hierarchy of custom tags that can be applied to individual documents, all documents in a particular cluster, or all clusters containing a particular combination of keywords, allowing the user to categorize hundreds of documents with a single mouse click.

(http://hotneuron.com)

ISYS Search Software, a global supplier of enterprise search solutions for business and government, announced the availability of ISYS:web and ISYS:sdk for the Linux operating system. ISYS:web for Linux is a direct port of ISYS:web for Windows to the Linux platform and therefore transfers the majority of capabilities and supported file types to the new system. ISYS:web for Linux is intended to provide users with enterprise search functionality, such as automatic categorization and entity detection, while administrators can take advantage of administration controls that enable implementation and monitoring of search trends and performance. ISYS:sdk for Linux provides software developers and system integrators with the ability to incorporate the ISYS search API into custom applications and solutions, whether for commercial distribution or internal use.

(www.isys-search.com)
 

Coveo Solutions Inc., a global provider of enterprise search technology, announced the completion of an investment round of $2.5M led by Louis Tetu, the former founder, CEO, and chairman of Taleo Corporation, a provider of on demand, unified talent management solutions. In addition to the investment, Mr. Tetu will join Coveo as executive chairman, where he will serve on the management team helping direct the growth of the company. Other investors include Patrick O'Leary, former VP of business strategy of Cognos, and Jean Lavigueur and Benoit Leclerc, respectively the former CFO and EVP Sales of Taleo Corporation and currently CFO and EVP Sales of Coveo, Inc.

(www.coveo.com)
 

Mochila, an online media marketplace for text, photo, and video content and Broadcast Interactive Media (BIM), a provider of locally-focused web solutions for television and radio broadcasters announced a joint partnership. Through this partnership, BIM will provide Mochila's rights-managed content directly to TV and radio stations in the 120 markets served by BIM. Using Mochila's open-standard RSS Atom API, BIM will fully integrate with the Mochila platform, automatically connecting BIM's content management and web publishing systems to access Mochila's rights-managed content. By connecting with Mochila's API interface, BIM intends to provide its stations with direct access to relevant news from the Mochila content repository. BIM also intends to customize real-time feeds through this open standards XML-based API using keyword, category, byline, source, and many other parameters.

Mochila also announced the release of its new ad-supported slideshow player. The new Mochila Slideshow Player is a widget that allows pre-created static or dynamic search related photos to be displayed in a 300x-pixel wide frame that can be embedded in any webpage. The player will provide publishers with a customized application to feature photos from other member organizations including Getty Images and the Associated Press. The widget application also provides monetization support for publishers with in-stream 300x250 rich media ad units, as well as attached fixed display and text ad units.
 
(www.mochila.com)
 

Pixsy Corporation, a media search platform that powers private label video and image search engines, announced a strategic partnership with Pageflakes, the personalized homepage. Under the terms of the agreement, Pageflakes will now offer Pixsy's new "celebrity search flake" to Pageflakes users. Pixsy's media search technology is intended to enable Pageflakes users to search a vast index of the web's latest videos and images with content updating to the minute. Pixsy technology allows site to run a branded multimedia search engine with content customized to that specific audience, thereby creating new search activity and targeted advertising inventory.

(www.pixsy.com, www.pageflakes.com)
 

Near-Time has announced Connection, an extension of Near-Time's collaboration and publishing capabilities for mobile devices and other Web platforms. The company reports Connection packages the functionality of Near-Time into a widget, providing a means to access content and interact with users associated with Near-Time spaces from smartphones, blogs or personalized homepage portals such as iGoogle. Near-Time Connection is free to Near-Time users.

The company claims Connection gives users an interactive platform that lets them stay connected to their Near-Time community no matter how they choose to view their content. The authoring environment, similar to that of Near-Time’s desktop offerings, enables users to remain active in their communities when on the road or using a homepage portal. Users can embed other Near-Time Widgets, such as those for Youtube or Surveygizmo, tag interesting content for better search capabilities and follow comment summaries, threads and Near-Time picks.

Late last month, approximately 1,300 executives, IT professionals, and curious onlookers descended upon the opulent Rosen Shingle Creek Hotel in balmy Orlando, Florida for FASTforward '08, a three-day business and technology conference--with an emphasis on search technologies and strategies--hosted by Fast Search and Transfer (FAST). The theme of this year’s conference, "The User Revolution," was a nod to the increasing prevalence of collaborative, social, Web 2.0-style technologies. John Lervik, FAST CEO and Co-founder, in his opening remarks at the conference, described a critical shift "that is placing users increasingly at the center of the information universe." Over the course of two days, a roster of illustrious and engaging keynote speakers took up this theme, filtered through their particular perspectives.

Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School stressed in his presentation that companies that adopt Enterprise 2.0 technologies and strategies will distinguish themselves from those companies that don't, and in doing so gain a tangible competitive advantage. Dan Tapscott, the author of last year’s Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, focused his talk on promoting the use of collaborative technology tools—such as wikis and open platforms--inside the enterprise. And Clare Hart, EVP of Dow Jones & Co., gave a captivating presentation about the changing expectations for search, including a drive toward "anticipatory search," in which information that users might not even know they need is retrieved for them before they search for it.

Hovering over FASTforward '08, and coloring much of the discussion of FAST's own plans for the coming months, was the news that Microsoft is angling to acquire the search company. Word hit the wires about the acquisition just a few weeks before the conference got underway, but all of the principals on both sides of the deal were well-prepared to address it (in as much detail as they were able) in front of the inquisitive crowd. Jared Spataro, group product manager for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, gave a full half-hour presentation on the acquisition and its rammificatons on Tuesday morning. Spataro described how Microsoft "got religion" about enterprise search in 2006, and set out to find a way to bolster its high-end search offerings. Spataro said that Microsoft was drawn to FAST because of the company's practical vision, the high caliber of its employees, and its "best in class" technologies. "The objective of the acquisiton," Spataro said, "is not to steal technology or bring a lot of people over to Redmond, but to invest in European innovation."

Not surpringly, FAST took a few opportunities during FASTforward '08 to drum up its own ideas about where search technology is headed and show off a few of its products. FAST demoed a soon-to-be-released product, called Content Integraton Studio (CIS) that employs a graphical technique for mapping content input and output. The company also talked about an upcoming upgrade to its core search engine, which has already been implemented in a few of its major customers (including Reuters and Thompson). FAST is still testing the upgrade in advance of a general release.

On the whole, the conference was a stimulating--if sometimes flashy--forum on the state of search in theory and in practice. When such a long, impressive roster of keynoters each takes their turn trumpeting the ascendancy of the user, it's hard not to take the hint.