The majority of reports I see in my working day are boring and useless, although an exception appeared at the start of the month by the name of 'Search Engines: A Pew Internet Project Data Memo'. OK, granted the title holds little promise, but the content makes up for that.
Stuff like search engine use is now the second most popular online activity behind email. Of those consulted, more than 80 per cent use search engines, with 29 per cent using them every day. Forty per cent of those who had been online for three-years or more also used it every day.
Using the real-world metric of minutes spent using a search engine every month, Google easily came through as the most popular site.
And talking of the real world, what search strategy is implemented for your own network? It seems a remarkable number of people use crude CLI-based tools which often fall short in terms of usability and efficiency. What would be better, say, than having a system like Google on your own network?
The advantages of a familiar, efficient search engine like Google are obvious. Luckily, as I discovered recently, you can now get Googling locally with what is known as the Google Search Appliance. Current customers include Boeing, Cisco, National Semiconductor to name but three large ones. I've recommended the solution on a number of occasions and the results in increased productivity and staff morale are remarkable.
Perhaps the biggest selling point, and one I like to drum home to the financial director, is that you don't need to invest in loads of training. Your staff already know how to use Google and the appliance interface is essentially the same.
Starting at $28,000 it ain't cheap, but the integrated software/hardware one-box solution you end up with could just bring the best ROI on many a recent spend. It will index everything you want it to, not just HTML stuff but Office docs, PDFs and PostScript. It will search Lotus Domino, SSL-protected servers and proxy servers. It implements the same relevancy rankings you are used to, plus hypertext analysis, cached pages, dynamic page summaries and even spell checking!
You can try it for a month before you buy it, which is handy. But if that still sounds too much, you haven't compared it to other search solutions such as RetrievalWare from Convera (www.convera.com) which starts at around £42,000 with an average installation being £104,000 plus annual maintenance.
The moral of this tale is that you should ensure you evaluate your search strategy and implementation now - before floundering in the sea of data that is starting to swell ominously.
Backgroundwww.pewinternet.org
www.google.com
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