10 Tips for Enterprise Search

By following these tips, you can find, index, and rank pages on your company websites more effectively, while improving your users' search experience.

1. Keep your search users happy.

Don't underestimate the importance of user adoption. People use tools that get the results they need and avoid tools that don't deliver. Unless your employees actually use the search tools you provide, the search technology you deploy — and the information assets they would have found and used — are both wasted investments.

The Google Search Appliance gives you a big advantage here: Because users know and trust Google search, adoption is a no-brainer (intranet search use often doubles within weeks of deployment) and most users' learning curve is nil.

Above all, ask enterprise search users what they think of the tools you've provided, and what they need that they don't have. And never stop asking.

2. Keep search speedy.

Search should be fast. Optimize accordingly, whenever and wherever you can. And use a search technology that's built for speed.

3. Make search ubiquitous.

It should be easy for users to search for information from any page on your company websites. Every page should include a search box — or, at the very least, a link to a search page. And every results page should also include a search box to facilitate subsequent searches.

4. Keep your search pages clean and simple.

Layout matters. Keep your main search page simple. Put advanced search features on a separate page. On results pages, try to keep navigational elements that aren't search-related to a minimum.

5. Crawl as much content as possible.

The biggest reason people don't find things is that they aren't there. If a document is important to the information flow of your organization, make sure it gets into your index.

6. Don't forget your non-HTML content.

Besides crawling your company's HTML pages, make sure you're also crawling servers where non-HTML file types such as PDFs and Microsoft Office documents reside.

7. Publish, publish, publish.

It's tough to index a document that doesn't exist, or only exists where it can't be shared. Too much information remains locked in employees' heads or on their desktops because it's "too much work" to put it where colleagues can find and use it. Do everything you can to lower the bar to publication. Saving to a crawlable server should be as easy and routine as saving to a user's desktop.

8. Don't be afraid to crawl secure content.

Establishing a secure search environment means enabling the search engine to crawl secure content — for instance, password-protected areas and HTTPs content — while limiting access to those documents. At the same time, don't secure documents that don't need to be secure. Use authentication to display protected documents only to users who are authorized to see them, while giving your users a single, coherent view of all generally available information.

9. Run test queries against your content.

After running a crawl, run test queries for important or representative documents, using keywords that seem likely to make a given document appear in the search results.

10. Measure the benefit and look to the future.

The amount of information inside companies is growing, and it's getting harder and harder to find. Make sure your search solution scales easily at every level — without a painful increase in the time and expense required to administer it.

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