Why enterprise search is not internet search

We explain why you can’t always get the best search results for your business from Google.

By Mary Branscombe, 4 Dec 2008 at 14:55

There’s a reason why Google is a verb. Yahoo may get more visitors than the stock price might lead you to expect, Microsoft is still pumping research and money into Live Search, and there are plenty of new search engines trying to steal even a few percentage points.

But with around 60 per cent of search traffic, Google is where most of us turn when we need to find something on the web. Wouldn’t it make sense to use the same techniques to make it easier to find information within the enterprise?

Depending on which survey you look at, businesses waste the equivalent of 10 per cent of salary costs (says the Butler Group) or information workers waste around three to four hours a week – a total of five weeks a year - because they don’t find the information they’re looking for a third to a half of the time (IDC and HP).

In small and medium enterprises in the UK, a YouGov survey this summer found 80 per cent of managers and directors waste up to an hour a day looking for documents. And according the same HP survey, 60 per cent of IT managers spend “a high proportion of their time” dealing with employee requests for help finding basic information on the network.

That means it’s worth investing in the right search technology. That doesn't necessarily mean using Google’s free SiteSearch on your intranet, familiar as the interface may be to users. For one thing, the information people need to work with is rarely in the intranet to start with, and more importantly, the techniques that work well on the web aren’t as well suited to internal search.

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