What’s trending with Enterprise Search?

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Enterprise search tools have been around for many years and it is the easiest way for us be more productive by uncovering the value of information assets stored in our databases and file shares. Then why are there so many studies and articles showing that knowledge workers spend at least 15 to 25%of their workday searching for information and only half of the searches returning useful information? While it’s well known that enterprise search is a key component to unify information environments and foster collaboration, traditionally search has been only an infrastructure purchase and departmentally focused. It connects some people but not everybody.
Over the past 12-18 months, the Google practice within Perficient has seen this departmental or infrastructure only idea ebb away and it’s being replaced with very unique uses of Google Search — from enhancing master data management strategies to supporting customer self-service on a public-facing websites. We are also seeing some new uses of search gathering steam in a number of key areas. Over the next year or so we believe that search will expand and include the following:
Mobile Search
There is a growing need for enterprise mobile search for knowledge workers, just like there is to provide robust search experiences to consumers. On-the-go employees and the growing trend in remote workers – both need the ability to search enterprise applications from their mobile devices, as they travel to client sites or even during meetings. Offering a robust search experience for mobile that mirrors desktop search is a trend we see growing over the next 18 months.
People Search 
Searching for internal subject matter experts on intranets may seem like a simple thing, but in reality it can cost companies more than 15,000 hours per year on just finding employee contact information.  As such, best practices are evolving after a period of inactivity.  In a recent article published by Nielsen Norman Group, the author mentions that best practices and the implementation of more robust people search stalled from 2006-2011 but there is a slow but steady resurgence in needing to connect employees more effectively.
Whether “fast” people search functionality is from an increase in remote workers or due to the demands of cross-functional teams within global companies, we have seen companies pursue adding “fast” people searches.   This “fast” people search can tie not only the contact information with all published internal content like reports and documents, stored in a document repository with public –facing content  like blogs, but also add ways to easily contact each other by including click to call, email links,  and even photos to easily recognize and help teams connect.
 Growth in Enterprise Search Strategy
The term Enterprise Search was a misnomer for many years. Organizations were deploying departmental solutions versus a true enterprise search solution. Now that the tools are in place, departmental solutions — while still popular — are being enhanced for the enterprise as a whole.
We are seeing customers continue to fine-tune the departmental solutions and expand usage to new areas within an organization. The strategy many clients are enacting,  focuses on adding connections to structured, unstructured and semi-structured data sources, ensuring that employees have a one-stop search tool that connects all data sources that the employee needs and is breaking down some of the organizational silos of the past.
Declining Use of In-House Search Tools
The days of “create the search algorithms in-house and manage search in-house” are over. Several clients had in-house resources develop search functionality. As a result of constant updates and changes, they saw rising costs to support the applications and found anomalies in results that were very time-consuming and costly to diagnose and support.  While search is an important infrastructure component, spending time to create a search platform doesn’t make financial sense when organizations like Google make it their job to know and understand search.
Learn more about how Perficient can help you with your enterprise search strategy.