The Business of Search
- What is Enterprise Search?
- Industry Overview
- Is High-end Search Dead?
- The M&A Map - Who bought who
- SCOE - Search Centers of Excellence
In the past, search was seen as 'tactical', a job for IT to take care of. The trend now is to provide business line managers with the ability to control search results to match business objectives, with search and analytics playing a more important role.
Companies need to understand how to make search work across the enterprise, on the customer and partner portals, and on their public facing properties.
Key business challenges:
- A supposedly mature industry that still frustrates users
- Provide information and control of search to business managers
- Increase access and maintain tighter security
- Re-gaining employee trust of the corporate search engine
- Accomplish more and spend less
Users finding the content or product they need - while giving managers a global view.
What do all of these trends have in common? Businesses are beginning to understand that great search is more than selecting and installing a search application: it's an ongoing process of monitoring search activity and updating search to provide best-of-class findability to employees, investors, partners, and customers. That's the business of search.
Enterprise search has grown from a checkbox feature into central requirement. And don't confuse Enterprise and Customer Facing Search with the big Internet search portals like Yahoo, Google and MSN - there's a big difference...
The Enterprise Search industry is composed of a few basic segments, with the high end being occupied by a handful of companies...
Mergers at the high and mid tier are continuing, embedded search is satisfying some user requirements, and open source engines are getting more and more attention, but there is still a need for high end commercial quality search.