How to Improve the Efficiency of Enterprise Search (
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Searching
for a document in the workplace usually involves sifting through
multiple pages of search results, which wastes time and money. And
because enterprise users are searching for specific information—not
just the most popular answer—they expect more precise search results
than they would get from the Internet. Simply put, the techniques that
work well on the Web aren't as well-suited to enterprise search.
A recent study noted
that "49 percent of survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that
it is a difficult and time-consuming process to find the information
they need to do their job." All search, whether on the Internet or in
an enterprise, is powered by metadata—the data about data.
Metadata is traditionally known as being the recorded information
describing the different parts of data such as names, sizes, lengths,
etc.
The reason why finding information
on the Internet is faster and more accurate than on an enterprise site
is because hyperlinks provide the Internet with naturally occurring,
high-quality metadata. Metadata is generated through Internet
hyperlinking. Each time someone links text to a Web page, the linked
text is interpreted by Internet search engines as metadata about this
particular page, thus impacting a page’s ranking on the Web search
results.
However, searching on an enterprise
site is a more difficult and laborious process because of the lack of
metadata. Unlike the Internet, there are no textual links between
documents in an enterprise, and no implicitly created metadata that a
search engine can use. Office documents are not naturally linked
together, and there are too few corporate librarians assigned to
manually tag each office document with the appropriate metadata.
Also, an average enterprise has
more content types, formats and security measures than the Internet,
which makes this search more time-consuming. The result is that workers
spend too much time sorting through pages and pages of irrelevant
results, as opposed to executing the tasks associated with their job.
The bottom line for enterprises
with large amounts of data is that it's worth investing in the right
search technology. The solution should automatically categorize
enterprise content, therefore eliminating time-intensive, manual
categorization. In an organization with hundreds, even thousands of
workers outputting knowledge, it could take years to tag each
employee's electronic documents by hand.
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