My KM World and Enterprise Search Summit Notes: From Birth to Billions: The Life Story of Google Enterprise Search

This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 Enterprise Search Summit and the 2009 KM World. This session is titled, “From Birth to Billions: The Life Story of Google Enterprise Search” by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager – Google. Here is the session description.

"This talk examines the state of Google’s Enterprise Search business, highlighting the origins of the iconic yellow box and the way the product and business search market has evolved over the past decade. Mistry highlights the challenges facing enterprises and providers of business search technology, as well as possible solutions and case studies of companies and organizations leading the way in search innovation.”

Cyrus began by describing the common problem of having too much information at work. The average worker creates over a gigabyte of information at work and much of this is in email. So Google were asked if they could bring Google into the enterprise.  At first they resisted but there was too much demand so they started Google enterprise search.

They found people wanted three things. First, people want simplicity.  The average number of words put into a Google search field is shrinking but people have the same expectations for good results.  They also want speed of response.  They did studies and found that the faster the results the more relevant people felt the results were. The third thing people want is relevance.

But things are different in the enterprise, Page rank is not relevant as there is not the same linking as on the Web.  In 2001 they launched Google for the enterprise in a small yellow pizza size box at a small price point that opened it up to more businesses. Cyrus said it also help lower the price of many other search tools. In 2004 they added more security. 

People felt Google was not connected so they did Open Source and established the connector framework.  Next after the basics were done they looked at the search experience.  They wanted to bring all types of results (text, images, etc.)  into a single screen.  This provided intelligent simplicity.  Next they looked at scalability so you can reach all documents. With Google you can add more boxes to get scale even up to a billion documents.

Now they are looking at social signals. Cyrus said this is where the innovation will be found.  The feature of user added results has been the most popular capability. People get really excited about this.  Another popular social feature is query suggestions to see related things that others are searching for.  They found a big jump is usage after this feature was adopted. They also look at where people click to see if a result should be elevated.  They use a complex algorithm to overcome any bias of current rank of this elevation.