Most discussion of information retrieval focuses on the algorithms behind search engines and information retrieval systems. However, there’s another side to search: the human users and the tool they use to interact with them—the search user interface. Because of their global reach, search user interfaces must be understandable by and appealing to a wide variety of people of all ages, cultures and backgrounds, and meet an enormous variety of information needs. Hearst will discuss the human side of the information-seeking process and focus on the aspects of this process that can best be supported by the user interface. She will describe the methods behind user interface design generally, and search interface design in particular, with an emphasis on how best to evaluate search interfaces to deliver maximum value from the wealth of information inside your enterprise.

In the 21st century, innovation is going to be the key driver of success.While this is taken for granted in the high-tech industry, it is becoming important in other industries as well. The leading companies of tomorrow are those which innovate and move faster than their competition. In such a fast-moving world, being able to effectively collaborate in real-time across countries and continents makes a big difference. And having the right tools is a big part of it. This talk will explore the close relationship between innovation, search, and real-time collaboration, looking both internally at Google and externally at Google's customers.

The stakes are high for effective information retrieval. This session will present findings from Aberdeen Group’s research report, “Enterprise Search: Discover the Next Opportunity for Growth,” released in September 2009. Research showed that top performing organizations using enterprise search were able to achieve a 6-hour reduction in the time individuals spent searching for information and a 15% reduction in customer support costs, year-over-year. By comparison, the remaining organizations showed only a 1-hour reduction in the time individuals spent searching for information and a 3% year-over-year increase in customer support costs. White will identify the key strategies and capabilities that enable organizations to gain value from search. Attendees will be able to benchmark themselves against their peers and understand the specific areas they can address to improve the gains delivered by enterprise search.

AMGEN, a leading human therapeutics company in the biotechnology industry, developed a set of best practices in enterprise search engine selection using a team of in-house and industry experts. A multifaceted, metrics-based methodology for evaluating enterprise search platforms was developed and the evaluations run in house by the team to ensure transparency and validity. This case study will present the criteria and methodologies used in evaluating enterprise search platforms for the AMGEN corporate intranet as well as share the surprises and roadblocks encountered along the way.

For years, the energy sector and other industries and government entities involved in natural resource management have used “spatially aware” tools to manage data. Technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) owe their existence to the demands of these industries and the need to create, manage, and access data using geography or location. In the energy sector, the single most important aspect in oil and gas upstream operations is location. For this reason, enterprise search solutions for the upstream energy sector are effective only if our notion of search is expanded to include spatial and structured search capabilities. Derenthal will present a study of an international energy company, covering the business drivers, content types, projected data volumes, and technology suite implemented to create a solution built on an enterprise search platform.

The world is rushing to digitize everything.We understand how to preserve paper but are out in the cold as far as being able to preserve digital content so that future generations can not just view, but also search through, that content to find whatever it is they are looking for.We need to think about more than just improving search for the here and now, and architect very differently to ensure that what we can search for now will still be able to be searched for and found well into the future.

Too often today, people think of search as a project rather than an ongoing program or operation. Search needs to be managed like an operation and a program; this means that there has to be overall coordination or governance of the search environment. There are four areas of search that benefit from governance, each of which has different models, processes, roles, and metrics. As the search environment matures, an organization can mature its governance model. This presentation will address basic assumptions of governance, governance at the institution and the application level, the applicability of data management governance models to search systems, and the alignment of governance with metrics.

In these challenging economic times, it is more important than ever to leverage every byte of your organization’s information to improve business processes. Indeed, the current climate has encouraged us to revisit our existing systems to maximize productivity with what we have. Attend this session to see how the global law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP has improved decision-making processes and streamlined operational practice by managing the organization’s existing store of legal and business information. Maximizing the benefits of its enterprise search system, Morrison & Foerster brings to each attorney’s fingertips key content and metacontent needed for daily practice.

Fast-paced organizations need accurate, timely search. Traditional search engines index information in batches, with unavoidable and often unacceptable delays. True real-time search includes each update to information as soon as it happens. This allow enterprises to store and search social media, financial data, and office documents without frustrating, costly workarounds for delayed indexing.

Gaining competitive advantage is crucial for your success. You have to be faster and better! Leveraging semantic interrelation of information objects will help your organization achieve better productivity. This session will provide examples of how companies quickly and effectively deployed semantic solutions to achieve competitive advantage.

There are a lot of vendors promising enterprisewide bliss for buyers of their platforms. It’s time to take a step back and think about how they work in the real world. The most common three approaches are universal enterprise search (the same tool for everything), federated search (one search combines results from specified search engines), and eco-niche search (a simple text search overall, with interfaces and easy access to ore-specialized search engines). There is no right answer for each enterprise, but attendees will learn from both good and bad examples and will develop critical factors for success.

Standard & Poor’s faces the same challenges as many of its customers, such as the need to search across multiple information repositories and improving relevancy for both highly targeted structured financial data and unstructured, webbased information. From this case study, attendees will find out how S&P identified the key search features that its customers require—from a demand for pinpoint precision to a desire to browse—and learn more about how the team implemented features such as search auto-complete, guided navigation, search applications, and searching different repositories.

Mitsubishi Corporation realizes large scale improvements in business efficiency with a new document retrieval system based on Oracle Secure Enterprise Search. The new company-internal search, spanning 5000 Lotus Notes databases and covering millions of documents, delivers high performance, is compatible with existing software applications, and preserves existing document access control.

Improving findability inside the firewall requires a holistic, integrated strategy that goes beyond selecting and installing an enterprise search solution. Challenges include content growing out of control, security requirements, and legal imperatives such as electronic records management and e-discovery. Business, IT, and records managers have different and often conflicting approaches to these problems. Although there is no quick fix to tame the findability beast, this presentation draws on the real-world experiences of a consultant and employee in federal agencies and large insurance and biopharmaceutical firms for a strategic approach to improving findability.

This talk will discuss the selection of an enterprise search application as well as its implementation and the laboratory’s institutional road map for enterprise search. The selection process will be detailed, including the process to narrow the list of possible vendors, developing the requirements list, the vendor demonstration process, selection criteria, and final selection. Specific implementation issues will be discussed including the repositories crawled, indexed, and federated; the complexity of the laboratory’s SharePoint 2007 environment; being an early user of the Open Text LiveLink connector; and metadata.

The field of search tools can be complex, but so-called taxonomy tools are even more scattered. This presentation provides an overview of the different kinds of software tools there are for manually creating taxonomies, automatically generating taxonomies, incorporating taxonomies into automated indexing/autocategorization, and incorporating taxonomies into search. Trade-offs often have to be made in certain capability areas of software tools, but different systems can be integrated to achieve the best results in multiple capabilities. Tools that come preloaded with taxonomies will also be discussed.

Much has been said about the opportunities for bringing together flexible enterprise search with the strict semantics and rich querying capabilities of relational database technology. But are we looking at a new paradigm in information access or simply better integration between two well-established technologies? We’ll explore this question by looking at a real-world example that combines advanced search (FAST ESP) and relational database technology (Microsoft SQLServer) to power an extreme scale e-discovery platform for LexisNexis.

The irony of having to define anything related to semantics will not be lost on this audience but it is needed. This session will highlight some high-value technologies that are being applied to semantically improve not only search results in the enterprise but also on the web. Describing the differentiators between why and how we use web search vs. enterprise content search will help clarify the use of semantic applications for each. Some current cases using semantic technologies will illustrate just how search expectations are being met to solve semantically nuanced retrieval challenges inside the firewall.

Current information volumes demand automated surfacing of relevant content and when such content is dynamic, intelligence must be embedded in the operations. Hear how the Chicago Tribune has successfully met this challenge: improving search engine effectiveness by automating key-wording and meta-tagging information, from web channels that cross 20 major US markets.

While classical site analytics explores how visitors navigate to and within a website, search behavior analysis focuses on insights into what users are looking for in the first place. In addition to giving valuable hints on how to make search itself more effective, it can reveal gaps in the content and point to usability issues. This session will tell you how to implement search analytics in practice and how to integrate it with existing search engines.

We’ve heard it said, “An organization’s most valuable asset is its people.” Customer-driven firms will answer, “Customers.” Research-heavy organizations may answer, “IP.” The common element is “knowledge,” which comes from many places including customer interactions, employees, consultants, and reports. Learn what issues prevent most companies from exposing and utilizing information’s true value. Several case studies will highlight how significant, measurable value was gained with access to knowledge across global siloed information repositories.