Last week I was starting to design a new demonstration environment for our Search and Knowledge Discovery practice. It would simulate a search application for a high tech call center, searching across a customer support case repository. I was having difficultly coming up with a scenario that would be applicable to a wide audience and include all of the diverse features that I wanted to show off. I realized I was falling into a trap just like many of my own clients.

Ask most people what an enterprise search application looks like and they will probably describe something very traditional – a search box across the top with 10 search results down the middle of the page. The results will come from predictable sources such as the corporate intranet or knowledge management repositories. And the experience will be the same for all users, except for security trimming that might hide certain results based on document permissions.

This kind of enterprise search application can satisfy some employees some of the time, but it is far from perfect. It doesn’t take into account the diverse job functions within a company and the different search needs of each. It doesn’t learn from experience and get better over time. And it doesn’t promote the discovery of information by exposing the relationships between different content sources.