Understanding Enterprise Search Platforms

Most of us can hardly remember what life was like prior to search engines. More and more, you’re probably hiring employees who have no memory of this. There was never a time when the information they needed wasn’t just an Internet connection away. Even though we all feel this way about how incredible search engines are, not enough companies are incorporating enterprise search platforms into their business. Without them, you’re missing out on very helpful data that exists within your company’s infrastructure.

The main problem with lacking enterprise search software is that you have all this information you’re simply not using. What makes matters so much worse, though, is that you’re paying for that data. You paid for it once when it came to collecting/harvesting it in the first place. In a lot of situations, you also paid for it just by creating it in the first place. However, now you’re paying to store it, even though it’s practically impossible to find. It’s like owning a library you keep behind a locked door. It’s probably pretty clear that an investment like that really wouldn’t be worth it.

That’s far from the only reason you should consider making room in your budget for enterprise search engine software. Another is that if you’re not using all that info your company creates and/or harvests, you’re not getting any utility out of it. This is the kind of self-evident problem a lot of people never think about until they begin considering enterprise search programs.

Think about all the ways you could get to better know your customers and overall market if you could effortlessly go through all the records you had for any of them. Wouldn’t that make it much easier to meet your company’s goals and perhaps have the best year ever, every year? Right now, though, without an enterprise search platform, you can’t get to any of it.

All of that info will also help you get a better perspective on your own operations too. Again, this can go a long way toward improving the way your company performs. See, the best companies don’t just leave their data to go stagnant. They go through it time and time again until they’ve squeezed it of all the aid it could possibly offer. If you’re not doing the same thing, then obviously you aren’t going to be the best any time soon.

That being said, if you oversee a fairly large organization or one that has been in business for a few years, you’ve probably created a solid amount of data. Even if you did have an enterprise search solution, you may not know how to properly use it. This is the difference between quality software and a platform that just has the word search in its name.

One issue facing your users is that they don’t know what to ask for. They know what they want, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy telling a search engine to go find it. Nothing is worse than knowing exactly what you need and having to deal with software that gets in the way. It’s like asking directions from someone who doesn’t speak your language.

Then there’s the issue of knowing where to look. Some search engine programs actually need to be aimed in the right direction before they can go looking for what you want. This is a huge time-waster and should be considered completely unnecessary in this day and age.

Finally, there’s an interesting problem regarding relevance. A lot of times, users simply have no idea why certain pieces of information are relevant to them. They could be staring right at data that could solve their problem, but it isn’t organized efficiently, so the employee has no idea they’re passing by the info they demand.

Quality search engines should be free of these problems. They need to understand the information they are reviewing in order to properly organize it and then leverage search capabilities that can find that data on demand.

As an organization, you also want to make sure you invest in a search platform that can be executed across silos. In the industry, silos refers to collections of data. You have unstructured silos, like the data spread across Google, and you have structured silos, like the kind within your organization. Like most companies, yours probably has multiple silos, many of which are combinations of the two we just mentioned.

All of these silos have their place and, chances are, your staff needs to wade through them throughout the course of their week. The problem is that you can’t search all your silos at the same time, so this scattershot approach becomes necessary. The bigger problem, though, is that a lot of your customers aren’t going to go through with it. They’re not going to adjust a query a dozen times, especially when they’re fairly sure some of those silos aren’t even worth their time. As a result, these lackluster workarounds get introduced into the workplace, become habit for some of your staff and information that is there for the taking never gets noticed.

Instead of making them jump between platforms, pick a search engine that goes across various silos when you need it to. This will make things much easier on your staff members and also produce more helpful results. A search engine like this can work just like the type we use on the web in terms of going through all the various locations important pieces of data could be stored and then presenting them in a consolidated and organized matter.

The vast majority of us don’t really understand how search engines work. That’s fine though. You don’t need to have a high-level understanding of this type of technology to properly leverage and benefit from it.

However, it will help if you understand some of the features your platform needs to routinely pull off effective searches. We already covered that it must be able to go through multiple silos.

You also need it to have advanced capabilities like synonym expansion, stemming, classification and other algorithms that can process the type of natural language most of your staff will be using.

When you combine all these different tools, you get an enterprise search program that can cast a sufficiently wide net, so no relevant information is ever left out of the results. You’d hate to be inches away from the data you need but miss it because your search engine could only pinpoint exact results or, on the other hand, brought back a collection of data that was mostly irrelevant.

Finally, don’t forget to award points for presentation. As we touched on a bit above, all the data in the world won’t do you any good if it isn’t properly organized. Over the course of a year, your company could waste a lot of man hours if employees constantly need to pick through the results returned in order to find what they need (or decide they didn’t do their search correctly).

What you want to look for in your platform is pipeline architecture. Your employees should be able to re-program the program as necessary to add or subtract various functions. This kind of customization will put all the data your company has at your employees’ fingertips.

Along the same lines, more and more search engine companies are creating their platforms in such a way that they can constantly be updated. This follows the trend set by other software manufacturers that understand the importance of constantly refining their product.

As your manufacturer creates better and better functions, it would be very helpful if you could simply download and integrate them rather than having to buy this new product and installing it all over again.

This isn’t just a smart way to make sure your employees can always find what they need. It’s also a wise way of protecting your investment and keep yourself from having to go back out and consider all new options every year.

It’s also the way that web search engines work. Google, for example, releases a new algorithm—the method by which their search engine finds information—about once or twice every year. By constantly refining their approach, their product never becomes irrelevant. You want to find a software manufacturer that feels the exact same way. While you may pay licensing fees for this ongoing support, it will definitely be worth it.

While every company will have different needs where their software is concerned, enterprise search platforms generally have pretty similar features when it comes to the ideal version. Start out by understanding that you need this kind of software and you won’t be much longer without it. The good news is that there are so many great options out there these days that you probably won’t have to look for long before you find the right one for your company.