A few weeks ago I was quoted in an interesting blog entry on Information World Review (http://blog.iwr.co.uk/2008/08/google-stakes-i.html) talking about enterprise search and, particularly how Google is, once again, putting pressure on the industry. I think it’s worth expanding on a couple of things, particularly what I mean by enterprise search going beyond “what’s behind the firewall”.

As Phil Muncaster quite rightly points out, for many, searching documents behind the firewall is exactly what enterprise search means, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. In our experience, larger organizations need to store, retrieve and track digital information that exists in many different containers such as e-mail servers, desktops, intranet sites but also, crucially, on their Web sites and e-commerce sites which fall outside the corporate firewall.

For most organizations, Enterprise Search Software as most people know it today can’t provide access to all the information it needs within a single search – that’s because the content exists in numerous locations and formats. When this is coupled with factors such as technical limitations, cost and bureaucracy, it prevents all these various enterprise silos being unified under one index. Certain ideas such as ‘federated search’ are being explored in parts of the industry but, in my view, you are better off having a few different products that each perform a function well, rather than trying to manage everything under one cumbersome, expensive project.

When using an enterprise search function behind the firewall, employees will expect complexity and even accept that they may need training in order to use it.  When people are using a public search function however, even to search for information connected to the organization they work for, they expect it to be simple to use like Google.

If this week it seems that SLI Systems is everywhere thats because its our busiest week of the year.

Here are some of the various events that we are visiting this week;

Enterprise Search Summit West
September 23 - 25
San Jose, CA
Booth #235

ExactTarget Connections ‘08 User Conference
September 23 - 25
Indianapolis, IN

DMinSite Customer Summit 2008
September 22 - 24
Boulder, CO

LENSER Client Summit
September 24 - 26
San Rafael, CA

SLI will be at the Shop.org Annual Summit next week (September 15 - 17) in Las Vegas, NV.

We are a silver sponsor so you will see our name on the information kiosks around the exhibit hall. The kiosks will help you find your way around the conference. Drop by booth #107 to find out how advanced site search can help you improve your ecommerce revenues.

To make the most out of your experience at the Shop.org Annual Summit we would like to point you in the right direction. SLI is teaming up with some of the top companies in the industry and we want you to learn how your website can be improved with their expertise.

To thank you for your time we are giving away a MacBook Air. Collect your entry card and stickers from the participating exhibitors and return it to SLI Systems, booth #107 to enter the drawing.

I saw an article by John Ferrara discussing how Alan Turing’s ideas apply to search (thanks to Daniel Tunkelang from Endeca for pointing this out on his blog). John observed that people often expect search engines to understand them in the same way that a person would. While search engines aren’t able to do this, one tactic he suggested was to help people formulate their queries by using a suggest function. I’ve blogged before that I am a big fan of this functionality. Yahoo has had their Search Assist for over a year, Google recently added suggesions to their home page and we’re offering our Auto Complete to all of our customers (now over 300 sites and growing). John predicted that this functionality will be ubiquitous in a couple of years and your site will look behind the times if it doesn’t include suggestions. I agree.

Another approach we take to query formulation is to show related searches on the search result page itself, both at the top and/or bottom of the results and with each search result. These enable people to execute a new query just by clicking on one of the search suggestions.

John went on to talk about how to improve the search assuming the user has done a good enough job of phrasing the query. He quite rightly pointed out that the best result is often not at the top and suggested reviewing your search logs to identify the most popular queries and tuning the results for those queries. I agree that it is important to  review and tweak the results for the most popular terms - but this approach isn’t scalable because search has such a long tail. The approach we take at SLI Systems is to watch which results the users are clicking on and rank those results higher. This lets the users do the tuning and means the search continually gets better without a huge effort on your behalf.

We have just released an  interview with Daniel Pfeffer from Lighting by Gregory. They are one of the oldest lighting companies in Manhattan with over 150,000 products. Maintaining accurate information for this many products creates lots of headaches. Listen to Daniel talk this and issues with running a fast growing website.