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The sorry state of search satisfaction

Martin White, intranet and search guru and fellow judge on the Intranet Innovation Awards, writes this week in eContent magazine about the Sorry state of search satisfaction on intranets:

For everyone, the past year has been dominated by depressing statistics. I thought I was inured to these negative numbers until I read the section in the "Global Intranet Trends" report on finding information. Only 14% of respondents were very satisfied with their search application. Certainly 47% were moderately satisfied, but this shouldn't be an acceptable benchmark. Only 6% were very satisfied with the content that was returned from a search.

As McConnell notes, despite improvements made over the past few years, about 40% of respondents are "not really satisfied" or "not satisfied at all" with their search application.

Having realised when I joined Step Two in 2008 that the search problem was more widespread than I could imagine (see point 2 on this post), it continues to perplex me why organisations don't have a better understanding of search.

Without fail, 'It's hard to find information', 'search doesn't work' and 'We want Google search' are three ever present comments in the intranet projects we do at Step Two Designs. Search is hard to perfect, but it's really not that hard to make some improvements to the terrible functionality most organisations have. Few people actually try to improve it, however, even in small organisations of 500-1,000 people. It's doubly strange because the benefits of better search are so tangible for users.

Martin has written two books on search, and James has written a great report on it and some other great articles too. I've listed and linked some of them below.

If an organisation's intranet search is poor, but there hasn't actually been any decent work or effort put into it, then a large part of the problem lies well beyond the search tool.

Making search work by Martin White

Successful enterprise search management by Martin White and Stephen Arnold

Improving intranet search by James Robertson

Search engine best bets by James Robertson

Search should work like magic by James Robertson

Nine ways to fix intranet search by James Robertson

Successful Enterprise Search Management

Martin White has announced and previewed his new book/report, Successful Enterprise Search Management, co-authored with Stephen Arnold:

"This is the first book to be written on the entire process of justifying, specifying, evaluating, selecting and implementing an enterprise search application," says Martin.

Stephen Arnold comments on his blog: "Key word retrieval is no longer enough for today’s increasingly savvy and demanding users. Few people want to guess what magic sequence of key words unlocks the information in an enterprise search system. Users want to go "beyond search" with the system providing suggestions, delivering answers, and providing actionable information. Laundry lists just aren’t what users want today."

You can preview the full contents and find details on how to order at a special pre-publication price over at Martin's site.