In 1992, James Carville coined the phrase, "It's the Economy, Stupid" a cornerstone of Bill Clinton's successful presidential campaign. Mr. Carville correctly identified – among the many factors at play – that the concerns about the economy trumped all other issues of the day.
Often, in the enterprise search world, industry pundits and certainly the search vendors (Google included) talk more about the many factors than the most important one: usage. There is, of course, relevancy of results, which we certainly believe is very important, and many other factors such as reach, security, ease of administration, and total cost of ownership. All of these factors matter to enterprises, just as, say, health care and foreign policy mattered to economy-watchers in 1992.
But at the end of the day, users know best. Increased usage trumps all other factors, because it takes relevancy into account. It takes usability into account. It takes reach into account. Business users will not use a system if it doesn't successfully search the important company repositories and return the information they need.
Because of this, data from our Google Enterprise Search customers is very insightful. Below is a live chart that one of our large pharmaceutical customers recently shared with us: a significant increase in their intranet usage after switching to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) from another vendor's solution.
What's encouraging for us is that this is not a unique story; a large number of our customers report back similar metrics. Whether on their website or their intranet, users value the Google search box. At Medtronic, for instance, intranet traffic tripled since the GSA deployment. At BP, intranet and website search increased by over 80%. And at Discovery Communications, the number of website searches has grown by more than 70% since deploying the GSA.
Increasingly, IT organizations are realizing the importance of usage, because it's usually a reflection of search satisfaction. And from the IT perspective, nothing is more satisfying than deploying a system that users will appreciate.
Posted by Vijay Koduri, Product Marketing Manager
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