Poor Data Quality gives Enterprise Search a Bad Rap

If you’re involved in managing the enterprise search instance at your company, there’s a good chance that you’ve experienced at least some users complaining about the poor results they see. A common lament search teams hear is “Why didn’t we use Google?” Even more telling is that many organizations that used the Google Search Appliance on their sites heard the same lament.

We're often asked to help a client improve results on an internal search platform; and sometimes, the problem is the platform. Not every platform handles every use case equally, and sometimes that shows up. Occasionally, the problem is a poor or misconfigured search, or simply an instance that hasn’t been managed properly. The renowned Google public search engine does well not because it is a great search platform. In fact, Google has become less of a search platform and more of a big data analytics engine.

Our business is helping clients select, implement, and manage Intranet search. Frequently, the problem is not the search platform. Rather, the culprit is poor data quality. 

Enterprise data isn’t created with search in mind. There is little incentive for authors to attach quality metadata in the properties fields Adobe PDF Maker, Microsoft Office, and other document publishing tools support. To make matters worse, there may be several versions of a given document as it goes through creation, editing, and updating; and often the early drafts, as well as the final version, are in the same directory or file share. Very rarely will a public facing website have such issues.

We have an updated two-part series on data quality and search, starting here. We hope you find it helpful; let us know if you have any questions!