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In attempting to make sense of the confusing Search Vendor landscape, I found some analyses that offered a guide to what product feature sets might be important.

In studying the literature, I found some good analysis of Search Usage Patterns – one analyst broke the user spectrum up as follows:

1) Low Subject Expertise & Low Search Skill – the Masses, who will use one or two work search terms, and need help interpreting the results;

2) Low Subject Expertise & High Search Skill – the Research Specialists, who can formulate sophisticated searches, but who need strong ranking and descriptive summaries to aid in evaluating the results;

3) High Subject Expertise & Low Search Skill – the Topic Specialists who use industry jargon and can identify relevant results, but who can’t format complex queries;

4) High Subject Expertise & High Search Skill – the Expert Analysts who can format complex queries, and who need for find all relevant results.

This was a useful breakdown, which sent me scurrying back to my Use Cases to match the profiles of users that we had identified with this analysis. In most cases, our users have significant subject matter expertise, and may know what they are looking for.

This places a premium on features such as: Expansion of search terms via Thesauri, generation of categories and groupings for the content, and multiple ways to organize and categorize result sets.

Armed with this insight it was back to reviewing the vendor offerings.