While no one's arguing about the ubiquity of Google in our personal and professional lives, there's a fair amount of debate around where search is heading.
When Merriam-Webster added the verb "google" to its 11th edition, it bestowed true cultural and business phenomenon status on the internet upstart. "Googlization" is more than just industry chatter; it's who we are, it's how we behave. That simple one-line search box has become our window to the web. Elegant in its simplicity, powerful in its reach, it has had as much influence on how we interact online as any other technological innovation.
The euphoria over Google, though, often extends beyond the internet world and can create confusion in business environments with very different needs. I suspect analyst firms that rebranded their "enterprise search" practices as "information access" and "navigation, search and retrieval" (NSR) did so in part because the visual perception and association of "search" with Google is now so strongly embedded in people's minds that it becomes difficult to establish mindshare for competing technological innovations.
While no one's arguing the ubiquity of Google in our personal and professional lives, there's a fair amount of debate around where search is heading. In a recent interview, Google's Peter Norvig touched on the merits of keyword-based statistical searches versus searches based on natural language processing (NLP). While some are painting this debate in a Beta/VHS context, I'd argue that future search innovations will be less divisive and more an evolution that ultimately leads to a healthy mix of technologies that are each suited to specific needs. Ultimately, this evolution will shape not only how we search, but also what happens after we've hit the enter key. Natural language search innovations will play a strong role in this future, but not without some effort to overcome the powerful "Googlization" effect. The pioneering keyword engines were particularly effective in getting people to use search in the first place. But we are still early in terms of search innovation, and the technology continues to improve. To be dismissive of natural language search innovations is short-sighted.
What is "search" anyway?
It turns out that "search" is a lot more than most people realize. Perceptions have crystallized, though, and for many people, search is synonymous with Google. We see it every day in all manner of business environments -- try to solve a very specific problem with search and everyone immediately asks, "Can't you just Google it?"
In reality, you cannot. Google is very effective in narrowing the broad universe of the web to the right haystack, but it isn't as effective for finding the needle within it, in part because every piece of hay looks the same to a keyword-based statistical search engine. This is where you need to recognize and appreciate the different applications for search technologies; how searcher expectations and behaviors vary by scenario and which technologies are most appropriate for each business situation.
Web searchers in general are "exploratory" -- they want to be directed to the right place, and short, two-to-three-word keyword searches often suffice in that scenario. Once on a company's site, however, searchers tend to be specific and action-oriented. The right search experience enables decision-making. In those environments, it may be more productive to use more specific queries, or a sequence of search and navigation behavior that will generate more targeted responses.
This is also true in other business contexts, like a customer attempting self-help on a support portal or a call center agent resolving a customer problem. Under these latter scenarios, user needs are more defined, their expectations are greater and their urgency in arriving at their solution is higher. Findability and information management are much more entwined in corporate environments. The search experience must return actionable information, in context, so quality of content takes on more weight. Good search is like a clean window -- it allows you to see things you've never seen before. Just keep in mind that good search is meaningless without good content -- one of those things could be a rusting jalopy in the front yard.
Search and knowledge management are flip sides to the same coin in business contexts where decision-making depends on access to the right information. Companies that isolate search from knowledge management initiatives often miss this point.