Equality Amongst Intranet Search Engines

“New search appliances claim to be uniquely adapted to meet enterprise needs,” writes Ben Dupont in Analysis: Enterprise Search for Network Computing magazine. “We tested eight enterprise search products and analyzed the technology’s security and architectural implications. Our take: The math just doesn’t add up.”

As I’ve written many times before, an ineffective search engine has less to do with the technology, and more to do with people and process and the ways and means by which content is categorized and tagged (see Fixing the sucky search problem and The search isn’t broken, we’re broken – Part I : Search and The search isn’t broken, we’re broken – Part II : Intranet Search & Taxonomy). This won’t however discourage the search engine companies from selling you.

Insurance group Royal & SunAlliance has replaced its intranet search engine with Google’s Search Appliance, which according to Silicon.com (see Royal & Sun Alliance Googles the intranet) has dramatically reduced search times on the corporate intranet.

“According to Royal & SunAlliance knowledge manager Tony Brierley, the replacement has reduced search times from between five and seven minutes to between 0.2 and 0.4 seconds.

The intranet is used by the company’s underwriters to pull up information when dealing with brokers’ enquiries. Underwriters require information such as rates or company policy guidelines that is stored on the intranet.

Brierley told silicon.com the company had a legacy of different search tools within the intranet, which is based on a Lotus Notes backbone. Interoperability problems between these systems slowed searches to an unacceptable level.”

I’ve never heard of an intranet search engine taking 5 – 7 minutes to process a search query, but this is good salesmanship.

Read the full article Equality amongst intranet search engines (www.IntranetBlog.com).