How to Measure Findability in Enterprise Search Solutions

Step #5: Repeat the analysis process weekly

Getting back to the analysis: Once you have scored a number of queries, looked into the bad ones and tried to understand how hard (or easy) it is to find answers to particular questions, repeat the process a week later—and a week later still. 

Now, armed with about a months’ worth of analysis, you should be ready to take the next step and build an ROI case arguing for greater investment with respect to the actual information access challenges faced by your organization.

What if your company already measures search? Then ask a deeper question: are you measuring the search engine or findability? Query logs can only tell you what people are searching for. You can't necessarily infer what they couldn’t find. If you conclude that, you may be looking more at the search engine than the user. One concrete step you can take is to interview the top users. They can often tell you what the search solution does well and where improvements are needed.

 Sid Probstein is CTO at Attivio. Sid is responsible for technology strategy and innovation. Sid brings to Attivio more than 15 years experience leading successful engineering organizations and building complex, high-performance systems. Previously, Sid was CTO at GCi, where he headed up development of the company's next-generation commerce platform. Sid also served as VP of Technology at Fast Search & Transfer (now Microsoft), where he developed next-generation search, text mining and multimedia capabilities.

Sid also served as VP of Engineering at Northern Light Technology, where he produced the very first enterprise version of the award-winning search engine. Sid was also Director of Software Engineering at Freemark Communications, where he helped implement the first "free" e-mail service. Sid was also Principal Architect/System Manager at John Hancock Financial Services, where the integrated sales illustration and client management system he designed was featured as a Microsoft Solution-in-Action case study. Sid can be reached at sid@attivio.com.