Enterprise Search Best Practices Webinar 4.2013

ENTERPRISE SEARCH BEST PRACTICES

Iain Fletcherifletcher@searchtechnologies.comBill Fowlerbfowler@searchtechnologies.com

Greg Gomezggomez@google.com

Maria Lundahlmlundahl@google.com

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Agenda

• Search Technologies Overview• Enterprise Search Best Practices

• Three pillars of enterprise search success• Google Demo Presentation• Q&A

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Search Technologies Overview

• The largest IT services company focused on search engines

• Consulting• Implementation• Managed services

• Technology independent, working with most of the leading search engine vendors

• An increasing proportion of customers using the GSA

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Search Technologies Overview

San Diego, CA

San Jose, CR

Herndon, VA

Ascot, UK

Cincinnati, OH

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Some of our GSA customers

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Introduction

• The GSA is used for a wide range of search solutions• Many initial GSA implementations address “plug-in-and-go”• We are working with an increasing number of GSA

customers to extend to enterprise-scale

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Enterprise Search Applications

Better search improves a wide range of business processes

• Compliance & Risk• Customer Service Support• Research & Development• Legal & Contracts• Competitive Intelligence• People/Expert Search• General Intranet…

Internal

• Partner Extranet• Online Publishing• Ecommerce• Customer Self-service• Field Maintenance• Website Search• Tech Sales Support…

External

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The Platform Approach

Key Advantages• Cost sharing provides lower TCO• Agility is improved, as it is much easier to create new

applications or repurpose content via search, to meet emerging needs

• Improved user productivity• Users benefit from a consistent and instantly available, repository

independent search experience

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Relevancy & Scalability

Connectivity & Security

Metadata Capture & Creation

Three pillars of Enterprise Search success

Enterprise Search Foundations

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Relevancy & Scalability

• Relevancy is easy over small data sets• Most modern search engines scale well in terms of

document count and query load• Maintaining relevancy at scale is the challenge

• Poor relevancy is a common complaint with existing enterprise search systems

• This is a sweet spot for the GSA

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Connectivity & Security

• What is the #1 reason to not find information?• Because it hasn’t been indexed

• Data connectors enable the search engine to access content sources

• A growing range of connectors are available for the GSA• There is also a connector framework for custom developments

• Every company has its own combination of repositories

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Connectivity & Security

• Connectivity occasionally creates “issues” • These are mostly caused by the characteristics of the repository or

the general IT environment, rather than by faults with the connector software

• Security causes the most issues• In larger organizations, security can be complex

• Multiple LDAP/AD servers• Nested permissions, etc.

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Connectivity & Security

Best Practices: • Don’t expect connectors to always “plug-and-go”

• Usually they will, but sometimes it will take a little effort• Secure connectivity can almost always be achieved

• Take security seriously• Make friends not enemies of repository owners by

showing them that you take security seriously – you will need their cooperation!

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Metadata Capture & Creation

Metadata is the foundation of important search functions. For example:• It supports relevancy• It drives dynamic navigation• It enables infographical results display

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Dynamic Navigation

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Infographical Results

• Via RESTful/xml results delivery• Holistic results display, graphical navigation….

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Creating & Capturing Metadata

Capture• Be diligent about taking what is available from the source• This includes metadata encoded into file paths, or available

from complimentary sourcesCreation• Automate the creation of metadata based on

extraction techniques• The GSA 7 provides new capabilities for this

“Entity Recognition”

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New with GSA 7: Entity Recognition

• Provides both “regex” and dictionary-based approaches to automated metadata creation

• Regex – identifies patterns in the content to match names, emails, phone numbers, etc.

• List-based, enables a focus on industry or company specific terminology

• Open & Customizable

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Summary

• The GSA 7 has a full set of capabilities to deliver enterprise search excellence

• Key issues are:• Relevancy at scale• Security-compliant connectivity capabilities• Metadata capture and auto-generation capabilities

• Plus the administrative simplicity you’d expect from a Google application

The Google Approach

• Google receives >1B queries per day

• Algorithm is made up of >200 signals

• >500 changes to the algorithm each

year

• Each change is analyzed through 1%

testing of actual Google traffic

• Over 10,000 such experiments each

year

Relevance ranking

Signals

Signals

Evolution of the Google Search Appliance

2002 2009 2012

6.14

Apr Oct Dec

2011

7.0

Sep

2004

6.10 6.12

2006 2013

50X Increase in Capacity between 2002 and 20132M to 100M documents

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Demo – GSA 7.0

• Cross-Platform Search Results• Security Trimming• Dynamic Navigation• Entity Recognition• Document Preview• Language Translation• Expert Search

Thank You!