With the surfeit of data available today, it isn’t always easy to find the exact and relevant answers you’re looking for. Moreover, the number of remote workers has increased exponentially, so the need for accurate and updated information to get to the right people who require them is greater than ever.
The role of information and knowledge has always been an essential facet of work. As the analog method of processing information has given way to its digital counterpart in the Information Age, search engines have become an important crutch for people seeking all kinds of data. But as good as these search engines are, businesses require more.
An Overview Of Enterprise Search
Enterprise search is a crucial and invaluable tool for businesses because it allows employees to search their company’s database instantly. It helps them use information normally hidden in files, documents, and others to analyze trends, make decisions, and field questions pertinent to their tasks.
Data accumulated by large organizations can become unwieldy and make for an overly complicated and inefficient data retrieval system. But enterprise search makes finding content a straightforward process. Basically, it’s a software solution that connects a company’s various data sources, including those on premise and in the cloud, making all available data accessible and searchable.
It can connect to specific data sources like Evernote or Gmail, Salesforce for sales and marketing, and GitHub for tech. Additionally, enterprise search can connect to organization-wide sources like Dropbox or Google Drive. With the ability to be connected to shared and individual data sources alike, enterprise search can access all available data sources for every authorized team member who uses it.
Enterprise search, however, isn’t just an indexing tool. It’s a highly efficient search app that can be customized to your information needs. Its user interface (UI) can also be customized and designed to give answers relevant to your enterprise. Remember: content that can’t be accessed is wasted content, so ensure that you’re making the most of your enterprise search tool.
Ways To Optimize Enterprise Search
Enterprise search can be the key to making your workflow more efficient and productive by providing your employees with the data they need. Below are some of the ways you can optimize enterprise search for your company.
1. Develop A Roadmap
First, ensure that you’ve developed a roadmap or an objective prior to moving forward. Before concerning yourself with the search platform’s technical implementation, determine its purpose in your organization. What business goals do you want to be supported? How can it help you reach those goals? Can it benefit its intended users, and if so, how?
Additionally, make sure that all essential data needed to reach your goals are searchable. Remember to build on goals that not only match up with your other objectives but add something to them as well.
2. Figure Out The Needs And Goals Of Users
Defining your company’s objectives is an excellent first step, but it’s also essential to determine the users’ goals and requirements. Make sure that they’re satisfied with the search results. A good search platform allows for good user experience (UX). To ensure this, pinpoint the areas that need improvement and act on those. You should also note what users commonly look for, and make sure they get the relevant results.
Remember that you can’t just throw every available data into the database and expect the search engine to do all the work. Enterprise search doesn’t work like commercial web search engines. Search engines like Google and its algorithms are designed to work on exabytes of data, and most enterprises deal with just a few terabytes.
Enterprise search may have come a long way, but users are still expected to specify and understand a search term’s context. So optimized enterprise search should have defined, specific semantics and criteria for various datasets. It should also have categories and the capability to find connections to other datasets.
3. Plan Which Data To Include
You should decide which types of data you wish to be covered by the software. You can determine the data that should be searchable by inferring from your users’ needs and objectives. Find out which information is the most critical and how it should be ranked in the search results. These information sources could be databases, publication tools, websites, and document management systems, among others.
4. Ensure Your Data’s Accessibility
See to it that your database is accessible through different devices such as tablets, laptops, and smartphones. With remote working on the rise, your employees should be able to access the company database via multiple devices and from different locations, not just on their main workstations.
5. Set Up An Enterprise Search Support Team
A support team created for your enterprise search will ensure that your business is getting the full benefit of the search platform. They can take note of results that don’t lead to engagements, trending words and topics, and failures. They’ll know the language used by the enterprise and its activities, which means they can identify and fix the causes of search failures promptly.
Final Thoughts
An enterprise search platform is so much more than an indexing tool. A fully optimized enterprise search is a powerful solution customized to suit an organization’s database using intuitive UI that gives valuable and relevant results.
Information collected by businesses is wasted if employees have no way of acquiring it. With enterprise search, individuals who need data can find and use them. That allows them to work more efficiently and productively.