Understanding why is as important as how when it comes to many things in business. Search is no different. CMS Wire brought this news to us in their article, “Why People Search: 3 Use Cases.”
A great deal of research has been done looking at information seeking behavior. It revealed that expectations change according to the context in which the search is being performed. The learning process is usually free of any time pressure, and the person may return to the search application repeatedly to accumulate all the information they need.
If you are searching for a specific application to complete a task the process may differ. Queries are very high precision searches. These are standard tasks and as such, people expect help to appear on the first page of results.
Searching to make a decision is different yet. Search here is to ensure you have found not only the most relevant information, but almost always the most recent. You need to be confident that the index is no more than a day behind publication, and ideally updated in real time. This scenario gets a little more complicated when social media is involved.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
