CSIRO's Enterprise Search Team
Three Search Problems Faced By Enterprises
Modern commercial, government and educational organisations face three major search problems:- Attracting customers and stakeholders to their websites via public search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and MSNSearch.
- Ensuring that visitors to the site can find the information and services they are looking for.
- Ensuring that employees can efficiently find the information and services they need to do their jobs.
Financial Implications of Poor Quality Search
- Poor website searchability and poor quality local search
can
cause
major losses of revenue for companies who do business via the web.
It also causes lost opportunities for all organisations who publish via
the
web -- Isn't that everyone?
Take a look at our paper on the searchability of online bookstores: "Buying bestsellers online: A case study in search and searchability". [Slides]
- IDC White Papers, Jakob Nielsen studies and industry case studies reveal the enormous hidden costs of poor quality internal search. Poor quality search costs money in lost employee productivity and in re-creating information which already existed but couldn't be found. These studies estimate that lost productivity from this cause can cost large organisations tens of millions of dollars per year.
What is CSIRO doing about it?
- We have developed significant expertise in evaluating search quality. (You have to be able to measure it to know whether and how much you've improved it!)
- We have conducted a number of scientific studies on what works and what doesn't when searching enterprise webs. (See our publications list.)
- We have developed a fully featured enterprise search engine, now being sold and supported by Funnelback Pty Ltdl, a CSIRO spinoff.
- We organise seminars on enterprise search topics.
- We are working on exciting new enterprise search projects.
Context
We are part of the Information Engineering Lab within CSIRO's ICT Centre. We are active in the areas of web search, search quality evaluation, test collections, search and searchability, distributed information retrieval, search using metadata and content, and, obviously, enterprise search. For more details please click on the links in the navbar to the left.