by Jevon MacDonald
February 28, 2007 at 1:45 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
At FASTForward in San Diego, many of us went to a roundtable discussion with Andrew Mcafee, and immediately the conversation went to the role of Search in Enterprise 2.0. My position was that it is too early to worry about search, because we do not yet have a problem (too much content) to solve in the Enterprise 2.0 world. Simple search is doing the trick.
The reason I enjoyed FASTForward however, is because search WILL be the next frontier, and we have a lot of questions to answer.
So, before we ask ourselves “what does search change?” I think we have to really talk about “how will search be changed?”
Despite what we’ve been telling ourselves, the fact is that nobody knows. Vendors like FAST are doing the smart thing (in my opinion) and that is that they are listening very closely, but not making any big moves too quickly.
- How could search be changed?
- Where do search and browse intersect?
- Is search a last resort or first tool?
- Is context (knowing what to show the user, and when) more powerful or less powerful than search?
- What role does search have in creating new content?
I wish I had these answers for you, but I don’t. I am pretty sure, however, that some of you probably have great insights in to what is working and what isn’t.
Don’t be shy to speak up in the comments!
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mednewsFebruary 28th, 2007 at 3:11 pm |
I believe the intersection of Enterprise 2.0 and enterprise search will happen via folksonomy tagging. Imagine the power of crawling the URL’s tagged by an enterprise? de facto controlled vocabularies would arise, centered around project names or codes, for example, and external links and internal links relevant to the project would be cataloged by experts - the project team members!
Tagging meets the criteria of utility to the individual - everybody bookmarks - which will drive its adoption, and the added value of being able to full-text search your personal tagged content (and/or the rest of the enterprise’s tagged content, if you like) would be another incentive driving user uptake.
I have never seen much uptake in newsgroup posting - aside from for-sale groups - and their modern equivalent, blogs and wikis, but I believe social bookmarking combined with enterprise search will the killer app of Enterprise 2.0.
Now, us IT types in shared services environments just have to wait around until some enlightened user requests a tagging application so we can get the project funds to implement!
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GordonMarch 1st, 2007 at 12:19 am |
Those are all excellent questions - but I think that people tend to get a bit obsessed with search - it’s like Google has changed the way we think, and we think that effective content management and searching are kind of the same thing. Your point on Context has a lot of merit. There’s an interesting discussion going on over at http://thrasherville.blogspot.com/2007/02/fallout-from-google-bomb.html
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ZiaMarch 1st, 2007 at 9:10 am |
Search is the starting point for users to get connected to the answers, people, products, experts, analytics, and services that they need. Contextual search one-ups keyword search since it understands what I want, where I am, which decision I’m making, what problem I’m trying to solve. Search is not a one-time event either, it is iterative. There are two types of search. Everyday search in teh enterprise is when you know that a document exists and you need search to go find it. The more interesting search is when you don’t know exactly what it is that you’re looking for when you start your search. By following your intuition and using search to prompt you to ask better and more refined questions, you may be able to discover new insights that help you find what you need, even though you weren’t sure it was out there.
I couldn’t agree more with “mednews” comment. I’ve done several Enterprise Search implementations with the Google Search Appliance and have always felt that the social bookmarking aspect would fit well into Search. It says a lot about the value of a document not only when it shows up at the top of the results list but when people inside your organization have bookmarked and tagged it as well (meaning they found it to be helpful).
We’re working on a prototype that mixes search with bookmarking. For each URL returned in a search it shows how many users have tagged it and lists those tags below the search result.
You can check out the prototype at http://203.217.30.218/yable/
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