Keynote Martin White - The future is search!

1. Martin White - Keynote

2. Findability Day
Martin White
Intranet Focus Ltd and Information School, University of Sheffield
1 October 2015

3. 1st edition (2012) 152pp
2nd edition (2015) 306pp

4. Running order
• The story so far
• Collaborative discovery
• Why just a single screen?
• Mobile enterprise search
• The blurring of the boundaries
• Complex tasks
• Next generation search – 2020 vision

5. 1959
In the beginning

6. 15 years later

7. Today
http://www.digital-workplace-trends.com/

8. Why?
• Organisational attitudes to search
• Recognition of the value of information but no commitment to information
management
• The majority of organisations have failed to invest adequately in technology, a
search team, taxonomy development, metadata and content quality
• Cognitive barriers to search
• Vendor attitudes to marketing and sales
• Search is difficult!
• Business requirements are not being recognised

9. Cognitive barriers to information seeking
• Inability to articulate information needs
• Unawareness of relevant information sources
• Low self-efficacy, where the user feels that it will be difficult to obtain the
documents
• Poor search skills
• Inability to deal with information overload
Professor Reijo Savolainen
School of Information Sciences at the University of Tampere

10. The vendor perspective
Search is difficult!

11. Future requirements – now!
• Bringing the power of teams to search
• Significant improvements in supporting the user dialogue
• Searching on the move
• Unstructured and structured – who cares?
• Being able to undertake complex search tasks
• The world outside on your desktop

12. ?
www.echoditto.com

13. No result count
Search term not highlighted in title
Duplicate results
Duplicate results
No summary

14. Collaborative discovery
• Many collaboration solutions have poor quality search applications
• Repository management becomes a nightmare
• We work with partners, which can lead to difficult security management
issues

15. Searching together
• Increasing amount of academic research into
• Collaborative information seeking
• Collaborative discovery
• Coordinated exploration
• Different names - same concepts?

16. Why a single UI?

17. Why not nine?
Advanced search
Tactical suggestions to
further a search
Filtering in
the result list
Extraction of
frequent terms Tool for managing
user groups
Personal library
for storing,
tagging and sharing
Multiple windows

18. Very mobile enterprise search
Left hand and arm
immobile
No printer
Eye – screen distance
highly variable
Moving at 5km/min
Thumb and
swipe
© Pulse/Corbis
Document
folder
Variable
signal strength

22. Enterprise
search
E-Discovery
Text analytics Data analytics
Graph search
Business
intelligence
Subscription
search

24. CIKM’14, November 3 – 7, 2014, Shanghai, China.
Many search scenarios involve more complex tasks such as learning about a new topic or planning a
vacation.
These tasks often involve multiple search queries and can span multiple sessions.
Current search systems do not provide adequate support for tackling these tasks.
Instead, they place most of the burden on the searcher for discovering which aspects of the task they
should explore.
Particularly challenging is the case when a searcher lacks the task knowledge necessary to decide which
step to tackle next.

27. https://mindfulstew.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/addicted-to-information/information-overload-conceptual-image/

28. Voice interaction
Cross-language search
Multiple depth screens
using touch/swipe
User-defined crawl
Predictive search
User-defined UX
More of what we will need!

29. martin.white@intranetfocus.com @intranetfocus