This article originated as a member question:

The two responses we received are given below along with a discussion of search engine satisfaction in a corporate vs. a public setting and some reasons why search engines fail to live up to their potential.

Two recent surveys — one by the Nielsen Norman Group, the other by the Pew project on the Internet and American Life — found that users are enthusiastic about search engines, but they remain unsophisticated about why and how they use them. Users are also unaware of how search engines operate and how they present their results. It's reasonable to assume that people carry these attitudes with them when they perform searches at work.

The Nielsen survey found that the success rate for public search engines was higher than for site or intranet search. The expectation that intranet search should perform as well as the public Google search can be in itself a source of dissatisfaction for corporate users. The technology may not be at fault. Publishers who expose their content on the Web often take great pains to make sure that public search engines find it. For most employees, publishing to the Web is nothing more than a by-product of doing their job. Unlike commercial publishers, corporations rarely have an Editor-in-Chief function to weed out duplicates, enforce writing standards, and develop a user-friendly format.

Responses
"Attached is a list of the questions we used in a recent survey of our intranet users....

"I usually recommend that purchasers of search software analyze what it is that they need to accomplish with the product. Some products are more suitable than others for various tasks. Some metrics to consider:

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Created on January 26, 2005