Enterprise Search

Webinar: What users want from enterprise search in 2012

If you ask the average enterprise user what he or she wants from their internal search platform, chances are good that they will tell you they want search 'just like Google'. After all, people are born with the ability to use Google; why should they need to learn how to use their internal search?

The problem is that web search works so well because, at the sheer scale of the internet, search can take advantage of methodologies that are not directly applicable to the intranet. Yet many of the things that make the public web experience so good can, in fact, be adapted in the enterprise. Our opinion is that, beyond a base level, the success of any enterprise search platform depends on how it is implemented and managed rather than on the core technology.

In this webinar we'll talk about what users want, and how you can address the specific challenges of enterprise content and still deliver a satisfying and successful enterprise search experience inside the firewall.

Register today for our first webinar of the new year scheduled for January 25 : What enterprise users want from search in 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Phrase for determining Sentiment Analysis / Customer Interest

If you lookup:

fedex "Package not due for delivery"

which is one of the status messages you can get when tracking a package, you'll see a lot of postings asking about it.

FYI: It means your new toy has arrived in the city you live in, but will NOT be delivered today, because they didn't promise to get it to you until tomorrow.  Whether this is to force customers into paying for express service, or simply a logistics issue, or a mix of the two, depends on your view of companies and I won't get into that here.

However, you'll notice a lot of the postings asking about it are from folks waiting for delivery of things they're very excited to get, often some big-ticket peice of shiny electronics.  They're dying for Fedex to deliver it - they're so anxious and upset about the delay that they motivated enough to go online and search, and make ranting posts - all because their "toy" is delayed.

So we have particular emotional response, often about an upscale product, with a reasonably distinct search phrase - cool!

Yes, yes, of course you could say that the customers are mad about the percieved injustice of it, the Occupy Wall Street spin, or that sometimes the package could be really important for other reasons, which are certainly valid points.  I'm not taking sides or passing judgement - and I found discovered this today looking for a friend's overdue toy - that's not the point.  I'm just saying that I bet there's a good statistical correlation, and of course it wouldn't apply 100% of the time - which would actually be quite rare in such things.

Dell.com Site Search acting weird today

FYI: The Dell Zino is (was?) a small form factor machine that could be used as a portable server, probably a bit larger than a Mac Mini, but still portable.

If you go to Dell.com and use their search and do a one word search for "zino" you get 8 results, but none of them are for that machine.  7 are for memory sims, and the bottom result is for a different dell machine, a small tower.  At first I was worried that perhaps they had discontinued the cute little guy.

I sent to Google and one of the suggested searches was "dell zino discontinued", aw... I was afraid of that.. But wait! - The first page didn't actually say it was discontinued, it just had those words in a long discussion thread.  And the second result goes to the Zino page on Dell.com, and it is still listed, though I wasn't able to actually buy it.  When you click the "choose" link you're asked to choose a market segment but the list was empty.  Maybe it's not for sale and their site search knows to know display it???

So how many machines does *your* vendor suggest for 100,000,000+ document dataset?

We've been chatting with folks lately about really large data sets.  Clients who have a problem, and vendors who claim they can help.

But a basic question keeps coming up - not licensing - but "how many machines will we need?"  And not everybody can put their data on a public cloud, and private clouds can't always spit out a dozen virtual machines to play with, plus duplicates of that for dev and staging, so not quite as trivial as some folks thing.

The Tier-1 vendors can handle hundreds of millions of dcs, sure, but usually on quite a few machines, plus of course their premium licensing, and some non trivial setup at that point.

And as much as we love Lucene, Solr, Nutch and Hadoop, our tests show you need a fair number of machines if you're going to turn around a half billion docs in less than a week.

And beyond indexing time, once you start doing 3 or 4 facet filters, you also hit another performance knee.

We've got 4 Tier-2 vendors on our "short list" that might be able to reduce machine counts by a factor of 10 or more over the Tier-1 and open source guys.  But we'd love to hear your experiences.

Domain Name Registrar Search Tweak: Indicate that you already own It in Search Results

Many companies own lots of domain names, and manage them on one or two registrars.

When you do a search for a new domain it'd be nice if they listed domains that you already own differently from the domains owned by others. It's a little tricky for them sometimes, with different account associations or something.  It doesn't look like they do, at least the ones I've played with.

It's not really the main domains you'd need help with, most people know their key domains by heart, but it's all those other domain suggestions they mix into the results. Their results include different suffixes or word variations. Some of these are only suggested if they're available, but they also show the top level domains with a clickable check box or red X .

So a search on a registrar can show 30 domains on a screen, some with red X's, even if they're taken by you.

If some already do give us a comment.

Some of Yahoo's most valuable assets might switch to Google Search

Yahoo Japan is one of Yahoo's most valuable assets , but it is not fully owned by Yahoo and is not obligated by Yahoo's recent agreement with Microsoft to use Bing. There are a lot of posts about Google trying to reach an agreement with Yahoo Japan but the best one seems to be this one by Kara Swisher.  If they reach an agreement, Google would essentially control the Japanese search market.

The Alibaba Group owns Yahoo's name in China, and is partially owned by Yahoo. Its currently using Yahoos' search technology, but is also free to switch if it wants to. Yahoo Japan has partnered with Taobao (China's top ecommerce website and a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group) to list over eight million items in a Chinese-language TaoJapan section. That might cause a ripple effect if Yahoo Japan switches.

Yahoo Japan is very different from what somebody in the USA is used to. Its very localized , with what a non-Japanese would consider a very cluttered site. Even Google (in Japan) has customized its sparse splash page and added links to numerous services to try to cater to Japanese users. Yahoo Japan scans passerby's and puts personalized content on billboards . Supposedly the install CD from most Japanese ISPs sets the home page to Yahoo Japan, and few users bother to change it. Cheap 100Mbps residential broadband with a IP phone is also fairly standard. Why Yahoo! is more popular than Google in Japan has some more details.

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 - DC

Even as we prepare for ESS East in New York (ESS NY from now on?), Information Today has issued its call for papers for the first ever ESS-DC to be held in Washington DC November 16-18 2010.

Follow this link to find background on what InfoToday is looking for; or jump right to the submissions page. Don't be shy: everyone who presents papers had, at one time, never done it before. What you know, someone else needs to know!

In our experience, the kind of content InfoToday likes is the information that can help an organization select or manage search and related technologies. Generally, real-world stories about how other companies and organizations have succeeded with search are the ones that attendees appreciate the most. 

We'll also be having a searchdev dinner at ESS DC this year. Details to come late in summer, but plan for it now!

Are you doing search now? Have you been successful getting it going on time and under budget? Tell your story. Submit your idea now!

Forrester and Endeca on innovation in online retailing

Jesse Goldman of Endeca, Sucharita Mulpuru, of Forrester Research, and Kurt Peters of Internet Retailer will present a webinar to discuss inexpensive ways to effectively improve online innovation and user experience. The announcement adds that "Webinar attendees will discover new techniques to increase margins through effective merchandising, increase sales through a more engaging, differentiated user experience, and gain market share through greater customer acquisition and retention."

The webinar will take place on Wednesday, February 18 at noon Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5:00).

While retail and eCommerce seems to be the prime focus of the webinar, online retailing is about finding good ways to engage the customer and to present relevance information based on user queries and site navigation. The same kinds of techniques are increasingly important in customer-facing and internal web sites, since the cost - and the risk - of not finding the right content is even more important with weaker worldwide economies. We think this kind of information is critical to anyone involved in the management of search in the corporate environment, and we are looking for to hearing what they have to say.

Register for this Excellence in eCommerce webinar by following the link.