Have you ever watched a commercial on television and tried to work out the thought processes of the creative team? For some years on British television, a brand of butter was promoted on the basis that it came from cows that played football. I’m not really sure I see the connection between this bovine athleticism and sweet creamery goodness.
I have the same reaction when trying to use search applications on websites and intranets. There is a disconnect between the vendors’ message and method. Sadly, the search vendors themselves offer the most stellar examples of poor search usability. Several pride themselves on the speed at which a search has been carried out, blithely disregarding the fact that this parameter has absolutely no bearing in assessing the value of the search.
Over the last few years, there has been an increasing amount of support for achieving good usability of web and intranet sites led by evangelists such as Jakob Nielsen. However, even his excellent books and the reports published by the Nielsen Norman Group have relatively little to say about search usability. Perhaps this is because with site design, much can be done through the content management software to enhance usability, while this is often not the case with search software. If the search engine does not provide some metric of relevance (e.g., Google search appliances), then this cannot be provided to the enterprise no matter how much users may request it. With search applications, the usability requirements have to be built into the specifications at the outset. A good example would be the highlighting of search terms in results, which may sound obvious, yet is still not a standard feature of many search products.

We’ve only just begun to tackle the issue of enterprise search usability—James Robertson has written a very good report on intranet search and I’ve developed a checklist of search usability issues, with examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly from major corporate websites, which I’m happy to email upon request. However, as a call to action, I offer the following insights into the state of enterprise search (un)usability.

COMMENTARY

The Importance of Dialogue

There is a mistaken belief that the ideal search engine will provide nothing more than an elegantly simple single search box, into which the search term is entered in order to generate a list of relevant results. Let’s call it the Google aesthetic.

While your results list may come back in a second, have you ever actually timed how long you spend on those results, wandering off on deadends, getting sidetracked with ads, and soon forgetting what the original search was all about as you find something really interesting through serendipity rather than effective search technology? This is not a criticism of Google specifically but a reflection of the lack of critical assessment of the search process by specifiers and users. A substantial amount of research into the way in which people search has been undertaken in recent years. Still, I must return to the work of Marcia Bates in the late 1980s, in which she emphasized the role of dialogue in the development of effective search.

The best analogy I can give is this: Imagine someone walking into Macy’s and asking the person at the information desk about the location of the birthday present section. The response will be that there is no such section and, knowing Macy’s, the store assistant will try to aid the customer in his quest—asking about the age and sex of the gift recipient, then almost certainly following up with further questions about his or her interests and the potential price range of the gift.

A search engine must be able to undertake the same process, which means it must accommodate two basic types of query. The first one is when the users have a good idea of what they are looking for and have some specific search terms in mind, perhaps even a document that they can use as a starting point. At the other end of a wide spectrum, there are users looking for ideas and having no sense of what the search terms might be: "I’m looking for high tensile strength materials that are corrosion resistant to hot sea water. "That’s a very real question if you are in desalination engineering, but try putting that into a basic search query box.

Relevant Relevance

As we all know, getting fast results is a small part of the effective search formula. We are looking for the right answer. Two ways to enable this are ranking and relevance, which are often used as synonyms but refer to different processes. The results of a search can be ranked by many different parameters, such as date, file type, language, and other metadata elements. Recall is the number of relevant results as a percentage of the number of relevant documents in the collection. Web search engines give a reasonably good recall but poor precision, i.e., they find some relevant documents but they also return too many nonrelevant hits. An enterprise search engine must have a high recall to be admissible in most applications. Providing some indication of relevance in a search result set is an important usability factor. There is strong evidence to suggest that users do not want to go much past roughly 30 results, and they need some indication of whether there are still a substantial number of high relevance items to review in any given search set, which may prompt them to take a different approach in formulating their queries.

Between Basic and Advanced

While the dream of a simple search interface perpetuates, many users turn to advanced options to help guide them to more precise results. The usual approach to advanced search is to provide a long list of parameters to reduce the length of the results list. Invariably, the parameters make no sense as selection criteria. One of the few examples of advanced search applied intelligently can be found on the website of the Bank for International Settlements      (www.bis.org). In general, mostadvanced search options are poorly developed and often represent a huge leap from the basic search approach. What is often needed is something inbetween. However, this often involves custom tuning an enterprise search interface to the specific needs of its user group.

Categorization and Guided Navigation

A search engine has to accomplish two goals in response to an initial query. The first is to provide a set of relevant results, and that is dependant upon technology, not the interface. The second is to provide as much guidance to the user as possible if the search does not come up with a good set of relevant references. One approach is to provide the user with autogenerated categories. Though in principle this can be helpful, I have seen many examples in which the list of categories is so long that there is then a need to scroll the results page, which is rarely a good idea. The website of Nature, the science magazine     (www.nature.com), gets it just about right.

Build a Dialogue With Users

Search is often used under conditions of stress and urgency to locate important content quickly. It is a critical tool used at critical times for critical decision making. It’s time that organizations pay the kind of attention search usability merits and invest in the time and money needed to test and retest search interfaces occasionally. Even as relatively small an adjustment as adding a new set of documents could adversely affect usability. It’s also high time that search vendors demonstrate good practice on their websites and work with their customers to a much greater extent than at present to get the best out of the collection and the search engine.

About the Author

MARTIN WHITE (martin.white@intranetfocus.com) is the managing director of Intranet Focus, Ltd. and the author of Making Search Work (Information Today, Inc., 2006).

Information Today seeks dynamic speakers who can talk knowledgeably about detailed aspects of how to implement and manage search within an organization. The emphasis for the Enterprise Search Summit West 2008 will be on how enterprise search software, enhancements, and solutions really work--taking an in-depth look at the complex issues that challenge experienced search managers and decision makers. The deadline for submission is May 8.
Click here to learn more & to submit.

CBS Mobile and Aggregate Knowledge announced they are teaming up to offer discovery and recommendation technology on mobile websites. In its first step, this partnership between Aggregate Knowledge and CBS Mobile will allow any user visiting the CBS Mobile News website to see and receive content recommendations based on what is being viewed, clicked, and read--anonymously and in aggregate--by mobile users with similar interests. For instance, if a user reads an article about "super delegates" they might be led to a story about the upcoming democratic primaries, because others who read about the super delegates went on to read about the primary. Consumers will see article suggestions initially in the form of "Your Headlines" functionality. Because content suggestions are user-driven, they change throughout the day based on natural shifts in interest from morning news, to feature articles, to breaking stories and trends. Aggregate Knowledge will initially deploy the Pique Discovery Window to deliver content recommendations for the CBS Mobile news site.

(www.cbs.com, www.aggregateknowledge.com)
 

Federated Search now has an industry-specific, vendor-neutral research site: The Federated Search Blog. The blog owner and host, Sol Lederman, spotlights topics such as the basics of federated search, resources, conferences/shows, and industry news. While the blog is sponsored by Deep Web Technologies, a federated search vendor, the site remains vendor-neutral, hosting a resources page with an array of blog links, powerpoints, industry reports, and links to vendor websites.

(www.federatedsearchblog.com)
 

HP and Tower Software announced that they have signed a pre-bid agreement for HP to acquire Tower, a document and records management software company. The deal is intended to enable HP to expand its offerings in the electronic discovery and compliance software market. The acquisition of Tower will add electronic records management to HP Software's existing e-discovery and compliance capabilities in information collection and retention. This includes both records management and identification. Under an existing alliance between the companies, Tower TRIM Context has been integrated with the HP Integrated Archive Platform to provide customers with a combined records management and compliance archiving solution.

(www.hp.com)
 

Yahoo! Inc. has announced its intentions to bring to market AMP! from Yahoo!, a new advertising management platform designed to simplify the process of buying and selling ads online. Central to Yahoo!'s strategy to be the partner of choice for advertisers, agencies, publishers and networks, AMP! provides an integrated, web-based solution that allows cross-selling across a large ecosystem of buyers and sellers. It is designed to allow advertisers to precisely yet easily target audiences while enabling publishers to better monetize their content.

AMP! from Yahoo!, formerly referred to as Project Apex, will roll out in phases beginning with members of the Newspaper Consortium in Q3 2008. Yahoo! plans to extend the functionality of the platform as well as participation to additional publishers, advertisers, agencies, and ad networks through the rest of 2008 and into 2009.

The AMP! platform is also designed to help marketers buy across search, display, local, mobile, and video inventory--all from a single, integrated interface. It will provide a suite of tools that allows geographic, demographic, and interest-based targeting across a network that includes Yahoo!-owned-and-operated inventory and more than 600 U.S. newspapers in the Newspaper Consortium. An open platform available to any participant, AMP! will ultimately include Yahoo!'s network of premium publishing partners, agencies, ad networks, and thousands of other smaller publishers from across the web. Yahoo! has invested significantly in the AMP! technology platform. Designed based on extensive analysis of the inefficiencies that currently constrain the industry, it is being built by an extensive team of engineers, product managers and strategists, and user-interface design experts deeply familiar with the online advertising industry.

For publishers, AMP! is designed to increase revenue with solutions targeted at accelerating premium brand and performance-based advertising. Key benefits planned include: Enabling ad selection and inventory management capabilities that are designed to ensure the most valuable and relevant advertising available is shown to users; Allowing publishers to manage their own private networks; Enabling advertisers and publishers to link together and take advantage of additional audience reach or advertiser demand as needed; Offering the control to choose what parts of the platform and its solutions are most relevant to use.

(www.yahoo.com)
 

USA Today announced the launch of a brand new instant message-based application. Available initially to users of AOL's AIM service, users will be able to search current and archived USAToday.com headlines and set up real-time news alerts via instant message. USA Today's instant message bot was developed by InfiniteAgent, a provider of instant messaging and SMS logging services. Once logged into the AIM service, users can add "USA TODAY" to their AIM Buddy Lists. AIM users may input keywords and when stories are published on USAToday.com containing those words, AIM users will receive an instant message with a headline, article summary, and link back to the complete story. Readers may also use the interactive service to browse and search current and archived USATODAY.com headlines.
 
(www.usatoday.com, www.aol.com)
 

ChartSearch, an enterprise technology company, has launched ChartSearch Intranet. Focused on changing the way the business and technology community researches and uses statistical and numerical data, ChartSearch Intranet offers an "insight productivity" solution that provides business professionals with a natural language, numerical search capability. When deployed within client facing departments, ChartSearch Intranet allows marketing and sales professionals to query, retrieve, and analyze data in real-time search situations. This ad hoc data query and analysis capability is designed to extend enterprise search and eliminate the need for involving business data specialists. The ChartSearch Intranet platform also generates context centric data visualization views of the searched numerical data.

(www.chartsearch.net)
 

Northern Light has developed a free search engine of business news and industry authority blogs. Northern Light Search also offers automated meaning extraction capabilities and collaborative social computing features.

The company reports Northern Light Search instantly connects business researchers with relevant business and industry news from thousands of business news sources, leading business publications and hand-selected industry authority blogs. Users can automatically analyze their results to extract meaning from the articles discovered in the search.

The company explains that in this business context, meaning extraction determines what information is contained in the documents on a search results list, such as companies, markets and technologies; suggests what business issues the documents address; assesses the tone of the documents; and directs the researcher to the documents that are most interesting based on their meaning rather than on their statistically-derived search relevance.

The social computing capabilities included in Northern Light's new offering include a Market Intelligence Wiki and a series of widgets designed to leverage the search activity of the Northern Light Search community of business researchers. These search widgets include tag clouds of most popular search terms and lists of the most popular articles accessed by other business users. The Market Intelligence Wiki provides an overview of selected industries and business trends, with a detailed picture of market segments, issues, breaking news, companies and government regulatory actions.

Coveo Solutions has introduced a limited release of Coveo G2B for Email, which the company says is the only e-mail search application to deliver unified search and navigation across both live and archived e-mail (such as Microsoft Exchange, Symantec Enterprise Vault) from any connected desktop, or Windows Mobile or BlackBerry mobile device.

Further, says Coveo, by giving IT and compliance managers fast, easy access to a 360-degree view of all of their company’s current and archived e-mail data, G2B for Email provides businesses with a preventative measure from security threats, such as employees walking off with PST files. In doing so, the company adds, G2B for Email also ensures that businesses are fully prepared to meet today’s stringent compliance regulations.

Coveo reports G2B for Email is the first of several new search-powered information access applications to be rolled out in Coveo Labs, which offers users the opportunity to evaluate new and emerging search-powered applications today. Coveo's approach allows it to obtain feedback and refine the products before they are made generally available to the public.

Cuill, a start-up search company, announced that the company has secured a second round of equity financing of $25 million, led by Madrone Capital Partners. The Series B investment follows a previous $8 million funding round from Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners. Cuill is a technology start-up that looks at search architecture, relevance methods, and data analysis in an attempt to provide users with a better search experience.

(www.cuill.com)
 

Nstein Technologies Inc., which provides publishing solutions for newspapers, magazines, and online content providers, announced that it and IXIASOFT technologies have been adopted by the National Assembly of Quebec for a large-scale document management project. Nstein's Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Text Mining Engine (TME) solutions and IXIASOFT's TEXTML server and XML document database will enable the National Assembly to roll out a new centralized platform to streamline the management of multimedia content and integrate interactive tools and services and provide users with a full range of search functions and direct access to historical content. IXIASOFT is a provider of XML content management software to organizations worldwide. IXIASOFT is the developer of TEXTML Server, an embeddable native XML database and search engine used to store, index and retrieve large volumes of XML content. IXIASOFT also offers the DITA CMS Framework, a content management solution designed specifically to author, manage and publish DITA-based technical documentation.

(www.nstein.com, www.ixiasoft.com)