Sixty guys named Sarah

We're always on the lookout for anecdotes to use at trade shows, with our customers and prospects, and of course here in the blog, so I have to report that we heard a great one last week at Enterprise Search Summit in New York.

The folks from Booz & Company, a spinoff from Booz Allen Hamilton, did a presentation on their experience comparing two well respected mainstream search products. They report that, at one point, one of the presenters was looking for a woman she knew named Sarah - but she was having trouble remembering Sarah's last name. The presenter told of searching one of the engines under evaluation and finding that most of the top 60 people returned from the search were... men. None were named 'Sue'; and apparently none were named Sarah either. The other engine returned records for a number of women named Sarah; and, as it turns out, for a few men as well.

After some frustration, they finally got to the root of the problem. It turns out that all of the Booz & Company employees have their resumes indexed as part of their profiles. Would you like to guess the name of the person who authored the original resume template? Yep - Sarah.

One of the search platforms ranks document metadata very high, without much ability to tune the weighting algorithms. The other provides a way to tune the relevance; but it also tends to rank people relevance a bit differently - probably stressing documents about people less than the individual people profiles. The presentation was a bit vague about whether any actual tuning that might impact these differences on either platform.

The fact that one of the engines did well, and one did not, is not the big story here - although it is something for you to consider if you're evaluating enterprise search platforms. The real lesson here is that poor metadata makes even the best of search platforms perform poorly in some - if not most - cases.

 

Comments

[Ed Dale]

Thanks for this great example Miles. I'll be quoting this story for a long time to come in stakeholder meetings as I try to get them to understand the importance of content.