As IT leaders we often see opportunities for innovation in the technology assets developed and managed within our organizations. Such is the case for the following proposition around corporate web site search, which may be relevant considering the recent introductions of Bing, WolframAlpha and the word “semantic” back in the news again.
The magnitude of the Internet’s success is now matched by user frustration in sifting through endless unstructured web sites and billions of web pages for immediately relevant information. Whether it’s a large company site or a small political Blog, users are presented with a rising sea of information and are increasingly challenged to get to a specific answer or fact.
The large general-purpose search engines have been of significant benefit for several years, in that they could find a million “needles” in the Internet “haystack” in less than a second. The problem is, eventually consumers will want to stop wading through all those needles and get a relevant answer back. The user will expect to interact with a system that can better understand the information and meaning contained in those millions of web pages. Some believe the days of keyword searches presenting millions of results back to a consumer are numbered.