Enterprise Search

What's in a name: Branding and Enterprise Search

We've been hearing some interesting stories over the last few months about how users perceive the quality of the results their enterprise search platform delivers - and the news isn't great for some vendors. It seems that if you label your search ‘Powered by Google’, typical corporate users find the results much better - whether the results are really powered by Google or not.

This comes to us anecdotally from a trusted friend and colleague; as well as from a customer of our company who has switched from K2 to Google for search on their large intranet site.

Our friend tells of a user study conducted by and for a large enterprise search vendor, a long-time resident of the prestigious upper right quadrant in the annual Gartner report. This company – let’s call it ‘Vendor X’ - arranged for  groups of users to search enterprise content using two different search engines. One system was labeled with the logo of Vendor X; while the other was labeled 'Powered by Google’ and displayed the Google logo. In fact, both systems used the same search software, that marketing by Vendor X.

Incredibly, users reported that the system labeled 'Powered by Google’ produced much better results than the one powered by Vendor X - even though the results were the same.

Convergence of Enterprise Search and BI?

Today Business Objects announced it has completed the acquisition of inxight, the developer of enterprise search tools for linguistics and text analysis.  inxight products were used in mainstream engines like K2 from Verity before a falling out over competing products and technology a couple of years back. Verity, of course, has been part of Autonomy for well over a year now - talk about consolidation!

This seems to be part of a continuing trend as enterprise search vendors discover BI as a potential market; and BI players like Business Objects discover the importance of search technology in great BI. Just a year ago, FAST Search and Transfer acquired Corporate Radar which it now markets as FAST Radar.

The real question is this: How well do BI and Enterprise Search really integrate? Andy Hayler of Kalido  asked this insightful question (no pun intended) earlier this year, and as yet I don't think anyone really has an answer. What do you think?