Enterprise search is falling far short of expectations, according to a survey of more than 2,000 directors and managers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France conducted by MindMetre Research and Smartlogic.

Enterprise search is defined as the process for quickly finding accurate information from within a company when it is needed. Yet respondents from more than half (52%) of U.S. and European businesses—including 55% of banks—say they cannot find the information they need within an acceptable amount of time, using their own enterprise search facility.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed (65%) define a ‘good search’ as taking less than two minutes to find what they were looking for, but only 48% report being able to achieve that result in their own organization—a 17 percentage point gap. Nearly 90% of respondents report that taking four minutes or more to find the information they want does not constitute an acceptable experience, and yet more than a quarter (27%) say this is the case within their own enterprises

Within the banking sector, 58% of respondents say they consider a two-minute timeframe to represent a ‘good search’ experience, but only 45% say this is achievable in their own company—a 13-point gap. Ninety-two percent of the banking executives surveyed say taking more than four minutes to find a search result is unacceptable, but 23% say this is the best their own firm’s search facility can achieve.

Respondents from the United States have the highest expectations when it comes to search, with 71% expecting to achieve the desired result within two minutes—but they also demonstrate the best performance for internal search facilities, with 53% saying that they can find what they want from within their company in that time. Only 11% of U.S. respondents find a search of over four minutes to be acceptable.

The research, commissioned by Smartlogic and conducted by MindMetre, also showed that 68% of all respondents—including 69% of those from the United States—think having a ‘did you mean?’ facility as part of their enterprise search platform would enhance their ability to zero in more precisely on what they need. Bankers were slightly more inclined to look for such a mechanism to aid them, with 73% indicating they think it would be useful.

Jeremy Bentley, CEO at Smartlogic, one of the world’s leading specialists in improving information ‘findability’ within enterprises, said: “There is evidently a substantial gap between expectation and reality—‘enterprise search’ often doesn’t mean ‘enterprise find’. That’s a serious strategic challenge for organizations that learnt from the recent economic downturn that they have to improve employee productivity and information efficiency if they are to take full advantage of the coming wave of economic growth.

The report concludes: “The information within an organization—including documents, web pages, and other content—should be under control, easily accessible, and rapidly retrievable when needed. Otherwise such information assets are being wasted. Platforms such as Google Search Appliance, Microsoft Sharepoint and Apache Solr have opened the door to enormous content management and search potential within the enterprise. However, it is quite clear that additional specialist contextual applications (or ‘semantic’ applications) need to be bolted on to these platforms to enable real ‘findability.’ Rapid, accurate information access is key to competitiveness, and will contribute to who emerges as the winners and the losers in the Information Economy, across the rest of the decade.”

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