Although it is incredibly tempting to lump search into one neat category, we must acknowledge that enterprise and Web search are profoundly different. Ten years ago, search technologies that were originally developed for the Web were applied to the enterprise - yet it has become harder and harder for workers to find and apply the critical knowledge they need to do their jobs. Numerous studies show the average knowledge worker spends at least 15 percent of his or her time searching for the information they need to be productive.1 Why? Although search technologies are born from the same intention, the objective of a person searching an enterprise site is much different in terms of intent and desired outcome than someone using Google to discover information like a local restaurant or movie listing. In addition, enterprise sites have very different requirements to meet enterprise-specific needs that include workflow, security, integration with existing systems and content moderation. When you think about the purpose (and urgency) of someone searching on a wireless company’s Web site because his or her phone won’t hang up, versus using Google to compile a list of places to visit in Paris, it makes sense that the search tools should be diverse enough to meet a variety of user needs. The industry is catching up to this, and I expect the divergence of enterprise and Web search to continue to the point where the two solutions are classified into entirely separate categories. Let’s examine this divide more closely.
Please State Your Intent
One of the main reasons that search offerings on enterprise sites should be designed differently from the Web is because businesses are dealing with a dramatically different searcher with a very specific set of needs. On a corporate site, visitors are usually looking for far more specific information, and this becomes even more specific when they enter the support section. Whether they are on a Web site for a major car dealer trying to learn more about the car that they are considering purchasing, or are trying to learn how to set up their new HDTV, the visitors are looking for targeted answers to specific questions that allow them to take action. This makes it significantly easier to successfully derive user intent - what the user is trying to accomplish based on what they ask and what they access. In fact, on enterprise sites, the most frequent 20 intents typically cover more than 40 percent of all inquiries, according to internal research conducted by InQuira. This makes the pool of options, and therefore the knowledge base, much smaller and easier to manage, which is good, because the repercussions of repeat cases are long lists of relatively useless information - Web 2.0 tools have made this even more salient (more on that later).
This leads us to the actual type of search. The enterprise benefits from knowing its audience and can narrow the search results by anticipating the user’s intent and eliminating subject matter that is not relevant to its business. Most enterprise sites use a specific industry vocabulary. For example, you don't have to recognize names of U.S. presidents or hybrid minivans for a typical banking site because they are not relevant to the industry. The sheer scope of information on the Web, the wide variety of contexts and concepts, and the different intentions of use all combine to make this need extremely complex.
The Googlization of the World
Different intents trickle into the way that people type their inquiries. When Merriam-Webster added the verb “google” to its 11th edition, it bestowed a true cultural and business phenomenon status. “Googlization” is more than just industry chatter; it’s who we are, and it’s how we behave. That simple one-line search box has become our window to the Web. Elegant in its simplicity and powerful in its reach, it has had as much influence on how we interact online as any other technology innovation. Because it is keyword based, most consumers know that a Google search is best made with simple words because they’ve learned that writing a full question like “Where is the closest movie theater?” will generate less accurate results than a simpler inquiry such as “movie theater” plus the ZIP code.
Google is very effective in narrowing the broad universe of the Web to the right haystack, but it isn’t as effective for finding the needle within it, in part because every piece of hay looks the same to a keyword-based statistical search engine. Findability and information management are much more entwined in corporate environments. The search experience must return actionable information in context. Because enterprise sites are dealing with very specific information and intents, they are in the unique position to offer semantic or natural language search to produce the most accurate results. If we invest in understanding the unique vocabulary that is used in the context of an enterprise-specific search, we have taken another step forward in making natural language processing genuinely applicable across that particular industry vertical.
