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Adriaan Bloem

Search, query syntax, Google and Starbucks

20-May-2009

Tags: Enterprise Search, Implementation, Industry Standards, Information Architecture, Endeca Information Access Platform, Google Search Appliance

There's too much here to write up in one blog post, so I'll pick one of the cherries for you here. Last week's Enterprise Search Summit in New York ended with roundtable discussions -- which meandered around several topics, and then down the escalators into the hotel lobby.

I was discussing querying a search engine with Daniel Tunkelang (Chief Scientist of Endeca), standing across the street from one of the ubiquitous Starbucks. He told me search phrases are much like coffee orders: if you don't go to Starbucks often, you'll hesitantly ask for a large coffee, with milk, maybe skim milk, and you'll say please. If you go there every day, you just go in and say "venti skim milk latte," pay, and leave with your coffee.

When we use Google on the web, we're used to the same kind of formulas -- we know Google's query language because we've grown accustomed to it, not because it's particularly good or bad at understanding what we want.

Endeca is doing research in parsing user's queries into meaningful commands for a search engine (as are many others), and it'll be interesting to see what they come up with. But there is an useful insight here that has a broader appeal: while public web search engines (like Google) have an interest in making the parsing seem easy, within the enterprise there's no reason to hide what processing has been performed on your original query.

As I walked into Starbucks the next morning for my daily dose of caffeine (sadly lacking my Lavazza Qualità Oro when traveling), I realized it once took me several attempts explaining this as "a large espresso," "an espresso with three extra shots," or "a double doppio." I broke the code because I could hear the order go to the barista as a "quad."

Maybe you should let your users see what you're actually ordering the search engine to serve up, as well. Show what you're expanding, removing, or translating. And don't forget that "no results" isn't necessarily a bad thing -- as long as you're sure there really are no results to display. It's more helpful to be straightforward than overly polite!