Final Results

I thought I would update everyone on the final results of this study, from my perspective. For the month where I went Google free, the results were less than stellar. In general, none of the other possible approaches to search created a significant improvement over Google. Most were not as good.

As long as the first page of results contains good information, the additional retrieval tools are not helpful. When comparing the results head to head, each time Google had a better result.

The other tools were better if I was doing a known item search for a specific, unpopular page. This is an unlikely scenario in the Internet, but quite likely in the intranet.

From this, I am going to take as my main focus on enterprise search to improve the first page of results, rather than the more interesting - and sexy - information retrieval tools. When I hit the point of diminishing returns with relevance tuning, then I will turn to the more interesting IR items.

I'd like to see how the Google appliance would do on our content, given these results. The issues are: the Internet is homogeneous content, while our content is heterogeneous, there are no strong cross linking patterns within our content, and the breadth of our content is much smaller. People will tend to be looking for a known item, not general information on a particular topic.