Search Evaluation Guide

Search Evaluation Guide

Seven critical characteristics your enterprise search solution must have

Relevancy
In simple terms, relevancy measures the "quality" of the results a search system returns, and how quickly users can find the exact piece of information they are looking for.

End-User Experience
End-user experience is about making it easy to find information. The bottom-line is that the ultimate proof of a search solution is its utilization - increased usage signals increased value for the end user.

Reach
Reach of an enterprise search solution refers to the types of information it can provide search over, and thus, find for the user. Users have come to have certain expectations for search engines, and those include being able to find every single piece of content "out there".

Freshness
The search solution you deploy must be intelligent enough to adjust itself to the different repositories and crawl them as efficiently as possible to keep the information fresh.

Access Control
An enterprise search solution must mirror the access control policies you have in place and only return those results that the user is allowed to access.

Scalability
Scalability of an enterprise search solution refers to three key metrics: the number of documents the search engine indexes, the number of queries per second that it can serve to concurrent users and the amount of man-hours it takes to administer the solution as it grows.

Total Cost of Ownership
When evaluating different enterprise search solutions, be sure to accurately budget for the following items: software license cost, hardware purchase cost, implementation costs, yearly software license maintenance fee, yearly hardware maintenance costs, ongoing search administration costs, user training, etc.