Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Search engines, distributed processing and content processing pipelines are not new. However enabling technologies of mature search engines, powerful content processing pipelines and cheap distributed processing are coming together to empower a next generation of information access, analysis and presentation much closer to the holy grails of knowledge management. Hear from the founder of Search Technologies how modern search engines are currently being combined with powerful independent content processing pipelines and the distributed processing technologies from big data to form new and exciting enterprise search architecture, delivering results only available to the biggest companies with the deepest pockets in the past.

There is a tendency to focus on search technology and the "results" it provides without thinking about why people are looking for data, information, and knowledge. They want to make decisions that have the greatest impact on the business with the minimum of risk. In this presentation the 'workflow' of a typical decision is unraveled to show the value of search as a decision support application. This is especially the case in organizations with extensive enterprise social networks. Taking this perspective enables the entire process of searching to be optimized, links search directly to business objectives and so provides the basis for a very persuasive business plan, and can be used to define the requirements for enhanced or new search applications.

Regardless of which search an organization chooses to deploy, best practices can greatly improve the probability of driving real business benefits, as this case study from Micron and Extractable shows. Micron needed a powerful way to deliver massive amounts of technical data to engineers designing the next generation of computing devices. With Extractable's help, Micron implemented multiple search techniques and functions within traditional site search and developed techniques such as search filters, search recommendations, and search keyphrase optimization. See from the inside how Micron.com utilized web analytics, industry data, session tracking, heat maps, and user research to inform and implement a superior onsite search strategy that yielded amazing results for Micron and for site visitors.

With the mission of providing access to the data and doc- uments that describe historical and current legislative activity, the Library of Congress developed the THOMAS system (named after Thomas Jefferson) 18 years ago. Today’s challenge is to replace this venerable system with one that is more modern and capable of meeting the needs of its 6.5 million unique visitors per year. LC needed to migrate to a modern search platform and provide a vastly improved web experience. Regardless of the mission of your organization, you can learn a great deal from the experiences of this project team.