I've been attending the KM World/Intranets Conference 2008 this week in San Jose, which has been co-located with the Enterprise Search Summit West. The result has been some very good papers and even better discussions. I'll be reporting on some of these in due course. One of the papers I gave was on the skills needed to support enterprise search, having found that the poor performance of many search implementations was because of the lack of professional support post implementation.

Google sponsored the lunch on the opening day of the conference and gave a somewhat lack-lustre presentation on the Google Search Appliance (GSA). For example no one had told the presenters that yellow text on a white background would be unreadable. One of the case studies was of the implementation at Kimberly-Clark, a global personal health-care company with 55,000 employees world wide. Apparently the previous search engine gave a very poor performance so the company chose Google on the basis of the strength of the brand, according to the Google press release. One of the key benefits of the implementation was that the company could continue to have the search implementation managed by 0.2 of a person.

I found this a little difficult to believe and checked out the details with the staff on the Google stand. I was especially interested in how such a limited staff resource would have the time to review search logs and sort through searches that resulted in zero hits, just as one example. The Google representative told me that this was quite feasible as the Google GSA automatically tuned itself without any need for human intervention. So I guess that if there are instances where zero or very few relevant items are found the GSA is able to work out why and correct the problem. Neat.

I also asked about crawl schedules, as these usually need to be managed with care depending on the content. Again I was reassured that the GSA developed these automatically even though the GSA is indexing 22 million documents. Do read the press release - it is interesting to see what aspects of the case study Google highlights.

So there you have it. An enterprise search solution that needs virtually no human support. If there are any other organisations who have implemented the GSA and are using only 0.2FTE I'd be interested to learn what the 0.2 actually does. Be warned - if you are using more than this redundancy could be imminent! You can find further case studies on the Google site. They make for interesting reading.

A final thought. If everything can be handled by 0.2FTE what are all those people posting their problems to the Google Search Appliance/Mini Group doing wrong?

Martin White