Your organization has implemented a new search engine and things seem to be running well. Staff are able to search for and find documents that help them get their job done. Employee feedback has been positive, and people are overall quite happy with how the search implementation has turned out. Now that the first phase of your search overhaul has been completed however, what’s next? How about this: look into ways your search engine can be used to improve not only its document findings, but also the finding of human experts who can help provide you with appropriate answers.

At Norconex, we’ve been quite lucky to be able to work with numerous different types of clients, ranging in size from start-ups to Fortune 10 companies. One of the most interesting benefits of working with a wide variety of clients comes from observing problematic behaviour patterns within organizations. This post focuses on one of these patterns: not being able to find who has particular knowledge within your organization. You may not realize it, but the solution to this problem is likely closer than you think. (more…)

Release 3.1 of Norconex Search Analytics brings a few new features and small changes. Below I’ve highlighted the most significant adjustments. (more…)

This coming October, London will host the first ever Enterprise Search Europe conference. This conference is a brother event of the well-established US based Enterprise Search Summit. Norconex is proud to present a variation of its successful talk regarding the importance of gathering good search analytics data, and how to best act on such data.

Using the great feedback David Gaulin received from his last presentation, he will present an updated talk explaining how following and understanding your users search behaviours can be used to successfully measure and improve your enterprise search investment.

David’s talk “How to Make your Silent Search Users Talk: Actions Speak Louder than Words” is scheduled for Tuesday October the 25th, just before lunch. The Enterprise Search Europe program is now available.

If you’re interested in the enterprise search space, and you’re in Europe, or traveling to Europe, make sure you don’t miss this event. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Top 10 Enterprise Search Must Reads

Looking to hone up your enterprise search skills, but having a hard time figuring out where to turn? Well, maybe we can help. With summer just around the corner, we know many of you will be packing up and heading to the beach for some well deserved rest and relaxation. If you’re like us, this also means you’ll be stocking up with a few good books to kick back and relax with (just keep in mind that the glare on an iPad screen is a reall killer). Why not take advantage of this time to delve into some of the wonderful enterprise search books out there? While there aren’t a lot of general enterprise search books in print, the one’s that do exist are generally quite good. We’ve been through just about all of them, so we thought we’d put together a list of our favourites, for colleagues and clients alike. A few of these books aren’t specificaly enterprise search related, but we feel are still quite relevant to the field. Think we’re missing a few? Let us know of others you think should be in the top 10. A bit of forewarning – we’ll be tough to sway!

Search Patterns, by Peter Morville and Jeffrey Callender
Making Search Work, by Martin White
Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work, by Stephen E. Arnold
Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success, by Greg Nudelman
Search User Interfaces, by Marti A. Hearst
Ambient Findability, by Peter Morville
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites, by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld
Enterprise Search in Action, by Marc Teutelink (early access edition)
Endeca User Interface Design Pattern Library, by Endeca (okay, not really a book but Endeca has done an excellent job with this – Instapaper it, and pretend it’s a book)
Search Analytics for Your Site, by Louis Rosenfeld (well okay, to be fair we haven’t read this one yet as it hasn’t been released. It will be soon however, and since we’re quite enamored with search analytics we definitely can’t wait!)

In Search Relevancy: Art or Science? (Part 1) I discussed several problem areas relating to the difficulties of improving search result relevancy. In this post I’ll discuss some of the different ways these problem areas can be addressed. (more…)

What a search summit! Always interesting to meet people with whom you can exchange tips, tricks, and techniques. A lot of familiar faces, a lot of familiar products, but also a few new comers trying to shake up the industry. (more…)

Once again the New York Enterprise Search Summit brought together a lot of interesting people from the industry. Several presentations were given in front of full rooms, which may suggest renewed interest in the search industry. This being said, that interest seems to be spread across the globe. At this search summit we seemed to meet significantly more people from other parts of the world than New York or anywhere else in the US. We had great conversations with people from Germany, Holland, Australia, France, South Africa, and the UK – always great to see new faces! Naturally, Norconex stepped in to represent Canada. Our VP of Services David Gaulin presented a successful talk on the importance of capturing and interpreting good search metrics to improve your search offering. (more…)

This release of our much appreciated Search Analytics product includes the following new features:

A new type of action captured: Refinements
The ability to view user queries in real time
4 new statistical categories
4 new statistic filtering options
Perform wildcard searches on user terms
Mark statistics as “Favorite” (dashboard)
Perform large XML imports
Export statistics as XML, PDF, CSV, XML
Many more …

Along with this version release, we are also officially launching our new product support infrastructure, using ZendDesk.

To get a more complete list of features and other product information, check our Search Analytics product page.

You want your search users to find what they’re looking for on their first try, but just can’t seem to make it happen. You’ve followed your search engines official documentation to the letter, you’ve read up on all of the best practices you could find, you’ve tried several different search configurations … yet, you just can’t seem to find the “perfect” relevancy formula for your enterprise search implementation. You’re now at the point where you’re about to give up and tell your team to start looking into a different search engine altogether. Wait! Is your search engine really the problem? (more…)

So you’ve launched your new enterprise search implementation for your customers, after an astronomical amount of effort, painfully tight deadlines, and tearing through a large pile of cash. You’re quite proud of your new search, as you should be. One small question is starting to bother you however – now what? (more…)