So often I come across individuals who presume that the only thing they need to do to implement search on their Intranet is have a keywords box and a 'good' search engine behind this. Sure enough in many cases this works fine, however I believe that much more business value can be achieved but putting a little effort into your search interface. I think the problem stems from peoples belief that searching your Intranet is just like searching the Internet, that is where I think they are wrong, sure enough the user is the same but the way the behave when searching on the Internet (e.g. using Google, Live search, etc) is very different to the way they behave when searching on the Intranet. Let me give you some examples:
1. If you search for a term in an Internet search engine and get no results or none of the results are relevant, you tend to presume that no content on this subject exists – correct? You (well if you are anything like me or the people I speak to) don't tend to go and use a different search engine – it just ain't there, right? However, on the Intranet if you search for a term you often know this content exists before you even search for it, so if you don't find it you a) get cross b) hunt around or try different search terms c) phone somebody who might know where it is d) moan about the Enterprise search. Now this could simply be because the content you were searching for is tucked away somewhere that you don't have access to or that isn't indexed by your Enterprise search.
2. Your Enterprise has an Information Architecture (IA), the Internet doesn't. If you have designed your IA well then users actually understand at least some aspects of it, so how about letting them narrow down by what they know about an item.
3. Closely related to point 2….Users know more about the item they are searching for in the Enterprise, they aren't just searching to see if anything exists but they are searching for something they have probably seen before or know exists from hearing about it. Therefore they know quite a bit about the content or attributes of that item – therefore an advanced search that allows them to narrow down where in the hierarchy, what it is tagged with, who or when was it created or modified would be of far more use in this scenario. Or instead of having an advanced search having some options to narrow down the search results after searching might be more useful – I will blog on this another day!