Now It's Personal

Search is an important factor in making portals the personalized knowledge gateways they should be

By Carl Frappaolo & Hadley Reynolds

Continued from Page 2

The New Search

In essence, the goal for e-business portal planners should be a search facility that can integrate virtually any number of existing data sources, from text to video to relational data, and deliver the search experience in a user environment that helps guides the business user through the discovery process. Such a facility should provide a comprehensive front end to SQL database searching as well as full-text query of Web sites, document, and multimedia collections. (See the sidebar, "The New New Thing")

Leveraged properly, this type of functionality goes beyond increasing the effectiveness of the conventional underlying search engines to include the ability to create "smart" e-business agents; providing insight into how employees, customers or partners are using a site (providing statistics that enable informed manipulation of the Web site, for example); and personalizing a site (generating different screens and pages based on the type of user; for instance, plum- bers and electricians see different product listings).

The new search paradigm will shift emphasis from the terse keywording of early generation search boxes to natural language interfaces that let users pose intuitive questions, such as: "What is the balance on my 401K plan?", "Which resumes relate to customer service?", "Chart the growth of Acme's stock over the last 6 months", and "How are competitive products positioning customer loyalty as an issue?" In each case, misspellings by the user will be autocorrected; queries will be expanded to include synonyms and word permutations (plurals, possessives, tense change, and so on); and ambiguity of terms and phrases will be automatically resolved through contextual analysis (for example, "stock" in a financial context vs. in a culinary context).

This level of control helps to optimize the ability of underlying text search engines to expand queries to include similar subjects, while simultaneously targeting the result set to a focused relevant answer. By understanding the format of structured data sources, this same level of functionality can be applied to transparently and automatically generated SQL queries against available databases. The logic behind this functionality should be provided out-of-the-box, be continuously modified through interaction with the system, be modifiable and customizable by users, and be partitioned so that specific rule sets are applied to particular user classes.

While expanding the available information sources by bridging database, document-based, and multimedia sources, the new generation of search facilities will also deliver results in flexible and intuitive formats. For example, unstructured text-oriented pages should be delivered with embedded graphics intact. Structured data should display in any number of user controllable formats such as reports, or graphs, or in succinct word-phrase answers. For example, when searching a database of products, the query "Which products have been discounted by more than 50 percent during the spring and Christmas sales campaigns?" should produce a simple list of product names.

By monitoring user interactions at a site, the new search facilities will play a much more important role that current approaches in providing heuristic insight into the effectiveness of an e-business or corporate portal site. The types of questions posed, the types of products searched for, as well as the results of each of these queries (which questions went unanswered, which product requests went unfulfilled), become readily available. The facility should help e-business managers dynamically adjust the content and navigation to maximize their e-business portal's responsiveness.

In a similar manner, the search facility should help increase user traffic to an e-business site by making the content of relational databases fully searchable over the Internet or intranet, perhaps by automatically generating "magnet" pages based on the embedded content in the database.

The new generation of search facilities will also raise the bar on the application of agent technologies. Growing in popularity as a way to monitor an ever-increasing volume of information, agents let users submit a query, point it to any number of intranet and Internet URLs, and run the query in the background continuously. Typically used to monitor updates to Web pages ("Inform me when information regarding this subject is added"), the ability to handle structured and unstructured data will support the creation of e-business agents that will monitor, for example, specific product availability or pricing ("Let me know when that make and model is listed for under $400 by any supplier").

Above and Beyond

As we see, with the business Web gathering speed by the Internet-month, traditional search is playing new and expanded roles across the spectrum of online developments - both inside the organization and in the development of e-business sites. From traditional engines tuned to support specific content for affinity portals; to question-answering services used to attract return visits at e-commerce sites; to taxonomy and categorization factories for funneling Internet and intranet portal content; to info- dashboards consolidating multimedia and multisource feeds; to wholly new approaches to analyzing Web content and building user experiences around domain-centered precision - the range of experimentation and development in managing the functions collectively called search has never been greater.

Carl Frappaolo (cf@delphigroup.com) is a cofounder of The Delphi Group. He has designed document- and knowledge-based applications for many Fortune 500 companies and major government agencies.