Dave Lemen

The Dark Side of Tuning in Enterprise Search

Tony Byrne rips the Google enterprise search product again. This time, he's unhappy with the fact that you can't tune the search results. In my experience, this really is a feature. Why? Politics. When The Management finds out that they can change the ranking of everyone's search results, all kinds of bad things happen. In one Dilbert-worthy episode I witnessed, a committee of The Management decided to "reward" those authors and webmasters who had tagged their documents with metadata by giving a bump to their relevance ranking. The assumption was that metadata = relevance. It was a rather unpopular change among The Users. The complaints (from users) about relevance ranking errors went away when we switched to the Google appliance. No tuning feature, no temptation.