Why Search is important for Publishers

If you are a publisher then its highly probable you may have heard a gazillion times how important a web search tool may be for the business but its quite possible you may not have been able to build a strong enough case for it given how much your online content revenues may be. Cheer up - you are not the only one going through the search hell - new content and products are published every day by your company on the web. You may have statistics that a typical web visitor scans 2-4 pages in each session on our website. I highly doubt that someone who doesnt already know what page they are looking for would be able to scan the product offering in that few pages. So assuming 50% of the visitors fall into this category, they are probably leaving your website w/o being able to find what they are looking for.

If you rely on a search engine like Google Mini or an open source platform like Lucene or Sphinx, you may be quite far from what is really needed to make things easy to find.

There is a secondary problem as well where people browsing through content are unable to search for their topic of interest. Same kind of problem here. However generally available search engines like Google and Lucene mostly work for this need. As a speciality publisher though, I may heavily disagree with it. A Google search engine is perhaps the worst option to pick for special enterprise content bundled and sold as subscriptions. With Lucene, if you have a budget and a development team, you can probably do anything you want with it. We figured faceted search filters was one of the most important features we wanted to have. Enterprise content is not linked up much which makes it harder to figure out document ranks. Business logic which helps determine this rankings is a must have.