Selecting an enterprise search engine

I remain surprised at how frequently the most important aspect of selecting a search engine gets overlooked in procurement processes. Namely, does it produce good results.

Google did not get where is today by having clean design (though it does), or no ads (remember those days?), or at least unobtrusive ads (as it does now), or really fast response times (though it has).

It got where it is today because its results were qualitively better than its competitors, at least at the time of its emergence.

AGIMO publishes a thoroughly comprehensive guide (in the form of checklists) of things to consider when Implementing an effective website search facility. I think its one flaw is not emphasising sufficiently that quality of results matters more than anything else. It does allude to it, in somewhat opaque terms just before the “Evaluation and selection” section:

It should not be forgotten, however, that the ultimate aim of any search facility is to guide searchers (at least those within the target group) as efficiently and effectively as possible to the information and services they need.

Information retrieval is one of the more scientific areas of computer science. It has decades of research, and with the TREC series, a long history of understanding how to do comparitive search engine evaluations. Comparing two or more search engines is not black magic, but a straightforward and scientific process.

I'll say it again, the most important thing when selecting a search engine is whether it produces better results than its competitors.