March 2021 | Insights From the CEO – There’s a compelling argument that Google Search has become part of the fabric of almost everyone’s daily life. Not just because of the power of the Google algorithm, but also of the enormously widespread SEO efforts of, well, just about everyone. That Google search ‘just works’ because of the combination of the genius of the search engines with the work done by those wanting to be found.
Maybe it’s time to apply the same concepts and a similar level of focus and attention INSIDE the enterprise. Maybe it’s time to stop treating search as a passive thing and recognize that it requires active attention.
Many of us have unpleasant memories of past efforts around metadata, tagging, keywords and other intra-enterprise master cataloging efforts. They left a bad taste in our mouths. But maybe enough has changed so we can try again and get a different result.
So What Has Changed?
I think three things make success much more likely this time around:
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Search CAN work – precisely because of Google in our non-work lives we all now know that search can work (even if it mostly doesn’t inside our work world) – this is a very different set of expectations and beliefs than existed 20 years ago.
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Rank and the ‘graph’ – 20 years ago there was just a sea of content and the search routine itself. The search routine had no way of knowing which content was better than other content and which was more likely to be more interesting. Brute force had to be applied in the routine. Everything had to be searched equally. This slowed search down and tended to emphasize the ‘dumbness’ of many searches — results were accurate but…uninteresting. Taken together those eroded confidence in search. But the ‘graph’ (whether Google’s or Facebook’s) and all of the metadata it contains to change the search game in regards to relevance and interest. Microsoft is bringing this new ingredient to bear inside the enterprise.
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AI – past efforts at tagging, metadata and taxonomies were — paradoxically — mostly manual. This meant that they were slow to be built, prone to inaccuracy and likely to be abandoned before completion. Which then doomed the whole search efficacy equation. Now with bits of AI it is possible to both speed up that process and use incomplete structures as a way of getting started. Behind the scenes Google also has metadata and tagging; what Google proved was that one could start with just a bit and use the searches themselves to help build out the tagging and metadata — that you didn’t have to have complete metadata before one even started.
What’s in Microsoft Search Right Now?
In addition to a much beefier and more effective search engine, Microsoft provides a set of SEO-like tools to prime the pump and get more curated search going. These are under the banner of Answers and include Bookmarks, QnQs and Acronyms.
