When Is 'Better' Not Good Enough? -- A Tale of Effective Enterprise Search
If you follow my blog, you know that I'm a big fan of the Coveo search product. I'm shown it to several of my clients and a number have actually deployed it. In fact, I spent a good portion of last week helping one client prepare for the launch of her portal. We actually invested a fair amount of time working with the Coveo Administraion tools to optimize the search experience for the user community. It got me thinking... There is no doubt (in my opinion) that the Coveo product is BETTER than the native SharePoint Portal Server search. It is not, however, a magic cure-all. I've seen some folks invest in the “better” solution in order to transfer ownership for the search experience to the 3rd party product. That's just plain wrong. YOU need to own the search experience... Coveo is one of your tools. When I sit with clients to talk about search, we walk through various sections of their portal and I ask: (1) who would be best served by this content? (2) who should NOT see this content? (3) Is this content still useful? Answers to these questions help us leverage things like exclusion filters, specific search scopes, and custom attributes. Together, they help build a quality search experience. To appreciate the viewpoint of the end user you need to act like the end user. “Did you mean ...?” is a great feature that Coveo has and SharePoint 2007 will have. It's a great question. But, how about “what have people searched for that has returned no results?” That's something that a search owner cares about.
A quality search experience can set a pretty high threshold, especially if you haven't invested in the effort to tag and maintain the content. Products like Coveo can help but... the real work happens AFTER the installation...