In an interview titled "The Avalon Search Consulting Method" that I had recently with Stephen E. Arnold, a respected veteran in the Enterprise Search space, Mr. Arnold asked whether the future of Enterprise Search is cloud, appliance, or custom systems. I couldn't help shifting the "future" question away from the hardware and instead towards the user experience. While some good progress is being made (e.g. faceted search, auto-complete, mobile search) I believe even the best Enterprise Search user experiences still have a long way to go, and from what our clients tell me, their users agree. While relevancy is only one piece of that puzzle, it's one of the most important pieces. I've seen all the top-tier Enterprise Search vendors replaced because their relevancy wasn't as great as advertised. I told Stephen that I believe the future of Enterprise Search depends on technology like Baynote's Social Search.
I must admit it's sometimes strange, given the size and scale of the advanced implementations we have done for some of the globe's largest organizations, that my favorite innovation for Enterprise Search comes from Baynote, a company many in the Enterprise Search space have never even heard of. But once you get to know the technology behind what Baynote does, it's not only obvious why the Enterprise Search vendors don't offer it, but also why it works so well for Baynote customers.
From my viewpoint, the main reason Baynote's relevance solution succeeds where others fall short is Baynote is light years ahead on tracking usage patterns on a site and distilling down all the data into the most engaging search results for a given query. Other search vendors base their relevance on the content--words extracted from potential search results and stored in indexes optimized for matching queries to content. It's amazing how powerful it is to turn the problem around, and instead match queries to the results others with the same query engaged with most, independent of the content of each result. Now even if the content doesn't contain the query terms (e.g. jargon, synonyms, and common misspellings), search works. It's a nice side benefit that when our customers use Baynote, I no longer have to tell them how important it is to maintain their specialized best bets and synonym lists. It's not often that the lowest effort solution turns out to be the solution that also provides the best results!
Contributor Bio: As Enterprise Search Practice Lead at Avalon Consulting, LLC, Sam Mefford has pioneered the consultancy’s practical implementation of global enterprise search projects, helping organizations smartly manage their digital content while mitigating the risk involved with executing their Enterprise Search strategies. After 4 years and over 50 projects at Avalon, Sam Mefford has become a passionate advocate for better search experiences. Sam is a progressive architect and thought leader when it comes to parlaying enterprise search, navigation, and content intelligence into competitive advantage. His foresight and unique skill in layering intuitive, enhanced user interfaces on top of these platforms has led to increased user acceptance and adoption of the implemented solutions.
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