NIE Enterprise Search Engine Consulting Service

NIE Enterprise Search Engine Consulting Services

Why should you consider hiring search consultants?

Are you happy with the results you're getting from your existing search engine? Do your users find everything they're looking for on your intranet or public web site? Are you hoping to upgrade to Enterprise Search 2.0 features like dynamic navigators and best bets? Are you unhappy with your search vendor?

If you are like most companies, you're either about to spend -- or you have already spent -- a great deal of money, and what you have now isn't living up to your expectations. In some cases, it may not even be living up to the demo that sold you on the product.

And what should you do now? Should you fix it or replace it?

It may not even be the vendors' fault: they are marketing toolkits, no matter what they are called. Because your content, your environment, and your users are so unique, you need to spend some time customizing your enterprise search engine to make it work best. We've found that many installed search engines are misconfigured or have not been optimized, so it may be possible to tweak your existing engine as well. And some companies do outgrow their search and really do need to upgrade or migrate.

And if you have decided to change engines, there are many vendors in the search market to consider.

Search engine specialists can help you define and rank business priorities, and then map those into technical jargon that vendors love to use. A good consulting doesn't dictate answers, but instead helps you fully understand all of your options.

Why should you consider hiring New Idea Engineering?

First, we are vendor-neutral. We don't sell a search engine, and we work with all of the leading vendors. Our advice is independent and based on years of direct experience with enterprise class platforms. We can explain the key strengths and differences between the products in this rather complex marketplace.

Next, we focus where we can get the best value for our customers: data preparation and indexing; and in optimizing the results. Our engagements include an evaluation of your results, of your content, and of your top queries. We know how to make it right.

We've been helping Fortune 1000 companies successfully implement Enterprise Search since 1996 -- we're search engine experts on your side. We provide skilled consulting services for search engine evaluation, installation, implementations and ongoing maintenance as content, objectives and search trends change. All of our engineers are experts or they don't go on site alone.

The NIE Professional Services Engagement Process

In the world of enterprise search, it's not always easy to get it right. Search software is complex and generally offers a toolkit approach to implementing great search; very rarely have we seen Fortune 1000 companies that can use an out-of-the-box solution across the enterprise. Some solutions are great for departmental systems or public web site search, but they typically don't scale to the enterprise level, or they are not very customizable.

That's where we come in. New Idea Engineering has been helping Fortune 1000 companies and those smaller companies that have with large numbers of documents make search work. We help evaluate the best solution for each customer, and since we don't sell a search engine, we are search engine neutral: we want you to succeed.

We also help companies implement enterprise search, either at initial installation or sometimes later on, after an upgrade or vendor change. We're sometimes not the first consulting firm that has been involved in projects; but, because we know search and can make it work right, we are usually the last search consultants our customers need to hire.

Some of the tough problems we've helped our customers solve involve custom security behind the firewall. Almost no one uses a single form of security: most use single sign on (SSO); ssh; and sometimes just filtering to match corporate search policy.

Other tough problems come from placing too much trust in the search engine and not enough in verifying the results. Knowing what your search engine indexed, and what it missed, is critical to giving your users better results. We've seen cases where the Documentum data store had valid metadata for each document, but the search engine missed almost half of the metadata and users were very unhappy with search results.

And then there's Enterprise Search 2.0. Search is becoming ubiquitous, and users just want the answers. How can you implement the kinds of results users have some to expect on the web within your enterprise when you don't have millions of sites linking to your content to make the results great? In fact, within the enterprise, you already know what the web search engines can't touch yet but sure want to: context. We can help you make your search results shine. Ask us how.

Search Engine Neutral

At New Idea Engineering, we have worked with all of the leading search technology vendors including FAST, Autonomy IDOL, Autonomy/Verity K2 and Ultraseek; as well as the open source engine Lucene. Helping customers make the most of their search engine investment is a large part of what we do. Since we don't represent any single vendor, we don't have to sell you something that may not work for your environment. Even if you already have your search technology, we'll help make it right.

Our projects succeed because of our knowledge of the technology and the tools we use, which have been developed over years of working with complex customer implementations. We believe that the most successful implementations of search technology have three common elements: attention to data preparation; flexible result list display; and a feedback mechanism to progressively improve the quality and accuracy of the search results and website.

Data Preparation

At the heart of all enterprise search applications is the index of documents -- what most vendors today call collections. Our experience has been that getting the data into collections properly is the single biggest indicator of a successful implementation. Vendors' out-of-the-box tools for creating collections are fine for many customers, but when you want to use industry-specific taxonomies, or want to include metadata to improve search results; sometimes a more customized indexing tool is better for you.

Some of the details we focus on to insure your indexing matches search industry best practices include:

Implementing the right server architecture for growth and redundancy
Proper index settings for fields and zones
Verifying the validity of metadata including dates and titles
SearchDQ analysis to verify that all documents were indexed properly
Designing work-flow procedures and scripts to handle new data and document exceptions

Perhaps just as importantly, we make sure your staff understands the full implementation so you become self sufficient and can handle changes over time in-house.

Displaying Search Results

When it comes time to view the results, you want to provide your users with enough information to identify the right documents, but not overwhelm them with too much information. Some issues we address when working with customers include:

Provide the user with the ability to modify result list options
Program result list templates for maximum flexibility
Minimize the impact for your staff when changes are made
Maintain a consistent look and feel with the rest of your web site
Better handling of popular searches
Tuning overall relevancy

New Idea Engineering solves these problems for you, drawing on our years of experience with advanced enterprise search technology and our experience helping large customers implement search consistent with industry best practices.

Evaluating Your Success

As part of an engagement, we typically will review your existing search history either from vendor logs or by processing your web server logs. This lets us measure how well your search engine is performing on your top queries and help us to create what we call a Behavior Based Taxonomy of your site. By reviewing the results your users see of your top 50 to 100 queries, we can begin making the changes needed to insure those top query terms - based on the search behavior of your users - are producing great results. When they are, you'll find more and more of your users love the way your search relevance works.

Making It Right

Once we have created a Behavior Based Taxonomy for your top queries, the problem is to identify the best answers for those queries and then to make sure those results show up at the top of search results lists. That may involve query tuning or document changes to try and trick your search engine's relevancy algorithms; or you could use the only solution that combines search activity analytics with the ability to promote documents and even to add "Did you mean..." capability: New Idea Engineering's SearchTrack.

Call us at 408-446-3460 or email us to talk about your toughest search problem. You may even find we've written about possible solutions in our free Enterprise Search Newsletter which you may want to subscribe to now.

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Specializing in Enterprise Search since 1996 - including FAST, Autonomy IDOL, K2, and Ultraseek, OmniFind and Lucene