The Search isn't Broken - Part II

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Information Overload
Information overload is eroding employee productivity. Recent studies reveal that the average corporate employee spends 25-35 per cent of their productive time searching for information to do their day-to-day job. "Our ability to create information has substantially outpaced our ability to retrieve relevant information," claims a recent Delphi Group report (Taxonomy & Content Classification, 2002). Some estimates claim that there now exists some 250 megabytes of information for every human being - and the glut is growing.

The previous information vacuum perpetrated by 'iceberg management' practices has been turned inside out. Instead of wading through information, users are now drowning in it. In addition, search technology has created an interesting and ironic paradox: regardless of the product or a user's ability to use it, effective searches require the user to know the terms they need to use before they type them into the search engine. This all means that intranet and Internet users are increasingly frustrated by their inability to find what they're looking for in a timely manner.

Autocategorization & Taxonomy Solutions
The current challenge is sorting, retrieving and filtering this over-abundance of information. In response to this challenge, a new breed of software solution has emerged in recent years that will search and index all of your content from any number of sources on your corporate intranet (or Internet site) and categorize it in relevant buckets. In other words, these solutions look at your site and automatically build a directory or navigation tree - even creating and inserting meta data within the documents as it searches.

Indexed information is then built into a browser-based directory of information, similar to the directory approach of Yahoo! To this end, the user need not necessarily know the exact terms they're seeking but can instead use a directory of information that is organized by connected themes and context. Furthermore, a visual and navigable hierarchy of content can activate intuitive relationships between information sources that are not evident when using a search engine.

Intuitive Relationships
Powered by complex mathematical algorithms, these software tools can build relationships between similar concepts and distinguish the multiple meanings of a single word. For example, the word "link" can mean one of many interlocking units in a steel chain, the action verb meaning to connect, or a piece of actionable HTML on a Web page. By creating and inserting meta data, these software solutions also extract greater precision out of your corporate search engine by allowing it to return results based upon taxonomy-powered meta data.

These new taxonomy software products replace the traditional, manual methods that have a number of drawbacks. Manual classifying, directory building and meta tagging require significant expenditures in terms of people and time, the former which can be inconsistent and not very scaleable.

"Many organizations have spent many years just trying to get it right," says Paul Whitelam, Product Manager for Endeca Technologies, a Cambridge-based software company that built the Tower Records Website. "Our approach negates this and it's done automatically as people navigate through the set. Endeca auto-indexes rather than builds from scratch… leveraging content meta data to dynamically generate the taxonomy (directory)."

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