(this article originally appeared at iainstitute.org on June 20, 2011)
Last month in May, I had the pleasure of attending the Enterprise Search Summit East in New York City with IA Institute board member, Shari Thurow. Shari and I were on a quest to discover the role of information architecture in Enterprise Search. We didn’t have to look too far, as both days were keynoted by IA Institute veterans: former IA Institute president and CEO of FatDux, Eric Reiss, on Day 1 and IA Institute founder and Principal and Senior Consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, Inc., Thomas Vander Wal, on Day 2 . Institute founder Bev Corwin was also in attendance and I quite was pleased to make a personal connection with a former coworker from PricewaterhouseCoopers, whom I hadn’t seen in ten years.
In Reiss’s keynote, “The Dumbing Down of Intelligent Search,” he challenged search professionals to have the user, not the application, serve as the frame of reference for search. Using Google as an example, Eric showed how the algorithm may not provide the correct context. Those who build the algorithm need to ensure that contextual metadata is available in the CMS. Eric also challenged implementers to understand the business and educate the content providers of those needs. “Matching patterns is not the same as matching needs,” he explained. And lest the users themselves forget their own power, Eric encourages all users to be critical and experiment, learn basic strategies and not to take for granted that the search solution is intelligent.
Thomas Vander Wal’s keynote on Day 2, “The Search for Social,” was a fitting bookend, showing how to deal with all the input once your Enterprise Search team has embraced the user. VanderWal described tools that go beyond searching for artifacts such as documents, emails and image/video content to searching for human resources, knowledge and expertise within the enterprise. Many presenters demonstrated social search tools for finding user profiles, activity streams and Yahoo! Answers-style knowledgebases.
IA/UX was a prominent theme. Throughout the conference we noted terminology from the information architecture/user experience umbrella nestled within discussion of ECM, SEO, text mining, predictive analytics, policy and governance. Terms like information glut, findability, folksonomy, facets, and rich semantics, as well as a big focus on the user experience.
A major concern in the Enterprise Search community is the question of what exactly is new in search these days? Reiss noted that there has been no major new search engine since Google launched in 1998. Google Search Appliance and Microsoft Sharepoint are still dominant. According to a panel of experts moderated by Martin White, called “The Renaissance of Search,” Enterprise Search has been running on autopilot for a long time and is only now finding innovation coming from places like mobile and social technologies. Panelist Alan Pelz-Sharp of Real Story Group said that consolidation around a product (Google, for example) does not equal maturity of a discipline. Panelist Hadley Reynolds of IDC, pointing to the now established mobile platform, said that the Google model is not ideal for mobile apps. For example, “A playlist model would work better for mobile search applications,” he said. Innovative thinking around search for mobile should be a growth area.
As stated above, user experience was a huge theme at the conference. Panelist Lynda Moulton of The Gilbane Group highlighted improvement in user experience as a major new effort in Enterprise Search. She said that semantic technologies have been built on artificial intelligence platforms and wondered if it will “disappear like AI” or if they just need better UX packaging.
Focus on the user was refreshing but also pointed to a challenge. A theme I found running through many presentations was the sense that after 15 years, the Enterprise Search field is not marketing itself well as a discipline, both to business management and to the users themselves who benefit from search. Search managers feel they have to continually explain the value of search to users, which ”