Now It's Personal

Search is an important factor in making portals the personalized knowledge gateways they should be

By Carl Frappaolo & Hadley Reynolds

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New Generation Search For E-Business

We are all too familiar with the "365,984 documents found" phenomenon that typifies our search results. Access to unprecedented levels of information has no value if we cannot succinctly locate the essence of what we need to know at any given point in time.

In e-business portals, we are at the beginning stages of creating applications that were beyond conception just a few years ago. These applications will achieve a degree of precision in view-level integration and search effectiveness that will transform knowledge management practices and e-business expectations.

Of course, the effectiveness of an e-business site is predicated on an interface that lets customers and partners easily navigate the depths of the site. Search is a critical element in creating front ends that enable simple, targeted navigation to relevant touch points in the e-business site. If users are lost in myriad sources or information artifacts, they may never develop an idea about what they want to purchase from, or supply to, the site.

The portal has emerged as the gateway to e-business and the knowledge practice. But the portal is not a single technology or product. Its primary mission is to help today's business professional manage the problem of "info-glut." It achieves its objective by providing information in context as the knowledge worker interacts with integrated views of actionable information from multiple systems and multiple media, streaming in from both inside and outside the organization.

In this knowledge-based or e-business- based environment, users are no longer focused exclusively on SQL and legacy databases, but also seek answers to business issues in multiple repositories of internal and Web-based documents. Thus, to meet the needs of the internal portal or e-business user, search functionality must stretch to meet new requirements.

As the portal user expects access to databases as well as document repositories, it becomes necessary to provide a level of search functionality that can access and search across all information types in their native format. Search engines that handle one or the other types of information must also be integrated - ideally, into a seamless interface.

Similarly, as the universal platform of the Web broadens the user audience for portals, the search tool must be appealing to many types of users. Searching must not require an education in SQL, Boolean logic, lexical analysis, or the underlying structures of information repositories. Users are demanding search functionality that is natural language-based and intuitive. Searches of all types of data are expected to interpret and expand queries lexically, while simultaneously delivering precise results focused on the essence of the search. These results should be ranked by perceived relevancy to the query. Queries, whether of structured data records or documents, should deliver answers - not a database records or collection of documents. In this manner, a search tool may also support a portal's presentation and personalization features, giving users control over the level of detail and presentation of the answer set.

Ultimately, the search tool should function against both structured and unstructured types of data repositories with a single query, delivering a single, combined answer set that is data neutral: That is, it should return streaming video resources as well as database fields or relevant segments of text documents.

To meet these expanded demands, a new market for search technology is emerging, one in which established vendors are seeking to broaden their functionality and new technology is coming to market with innovative approaches against new Web-based engines.